Author: foxtongue
don’t let fnord fade
Robert Anton Wilson, god-genius, the “novelist, essayist, philosopher, psychologist, futurologist, anarchist, and conspiracy theory researcher” author of the Illuminati Trilogy, Operation Mindfuck, and most of what you’re ever going to find on Discordianism, is in serious need of some help
Basically he’s “dying at his home from post polio syndrome. He has enough money for next months rent and after that, will be unable to pay. He cannot walk, has a hard time talking and swallowing, is extremely frail and needs full time care that is being provided by several friends-fans-volunteers and family. We appeal to you to help financially for the next few months to let him die at his home in peace.”
Any donations can be made to Bob directly to the Paypal account olgaceline@gmail.com.
You can also send a check payable to Robert Anton Wilson to
Dennis Berry c/o Futique Trust
P.O. Box 3561
Santa Cruz, CA 95063.
Apart from donating directly to RAW via Paypal, the guys at Giant Robot Printing have this excellent T-Shirt for sale, from which $10 goes to aid RAW.
BoingBoing has an update: “this morning Bob’s daughter showed up at his house in tears because she had checked his PayPal account and found money for next month’s rent plus more. Bob called me to say that he couldn’t believe people would care so much about him and as we talked (which isn’t easy for him at this point) he was overcome with emotion more than once. He is so touched and RELIEVED at the possibility of staying in his home. He kept repeating to me his deep felt appreciation and disbelief that people would care so much about him. What a humble and sweet man.”
I say send what you can anyway. He’s been such an intelligent boon to our culture that there should be a saintday’s in his name, marking him as consort to his beloved Eris simply for his dedication to sharply questioning assumptions made by far too many people.
too tired for content, have some multi-era loveliness
it seemed like a good idea at the time
David Bloom cheers me up.
D: Who was it?
J: An accordion playing morris dancer.
D: You should have known better than to sleep with a morris dancer.
J: What? Why’s that? How do you know?
D: I just know. Something about the little bells.
So does Michael Green.
M: Too different? That’s like saying a diamond is too shiny, that it’s too precious, too rare. Wait, they’re not rare. They’re terrible. Forget everything I said. Except the good bits. You’re not blood money. Are you sure you don’t want a drink?
I’m still processing photos from before my camera was stolen, it feels like I’m lying
Let’s all give a big hand to Neal Stephenson for forecasting Reverand Wayne’s Pearly Gates Franchaise.
I want you all to come to the Moon Festival. Saturday I thought I had rehearsal, but instead of explaining how to safely set fire to things, I ended up arranging and directing the choreography, making it my own show.
I have another class to teach today, (they’ve put me in charge of a team of maybe twenty people), which is something I appreciate saying. It feels right. I’m trying to get ahold of myself, like I’m calling through lines that have been torn down in a wind storm. The power lines outside look dead and brown and organic. (Leftover’s from a childhood memory of nightmare). Something this appropriate is grounding. I start to feel like I understand all the people who try to tell me that one day I’ll be famous.
Saturday morning was strange for me. The clouds erased any city farther away than three blocks, emphasizing the Twilight Zone feeling of disconnectedness that I woke with. The only sounds were those I made and the traffic two blocks away. If I closed my eyes, I wasn’t around to talk to, like a crumpled piece of paper thrown into a fire, the same interpretation of the world that led me to try and walk off the edge of the city when I was younger, out into the dark of nothing in particular. I think of once where I meant to go to work and found myself in Victoria instead. Taking busses at random brought me to the ferry terminal and then in a line-up, then on another bus. My wings were too small to fly, I guess, so I skimmed above the ground, going where other people were going, losing individuality in Brownian motion. Not one person said a word to me that entire day. I was cut off, a few hundred miles didn’t matter. The temporal world had nothing to do with me. Postal service lyrics: “I was the one worth leaving.”
paging Dr. Jane Tiptree (of Carnosaur)
Scientists see the softer side of Tyrannosaurus rex:
When scientists found a massive Tyrannosaurus rex thigh bone in a remote region of Montana a few months ago, they were forced to break the bone in two in order to fit it into the transport helicopter. This act of necessity revealed a startling surprise: soft tissue that had seemingly resisted fossilization still existed inside the bone. This tissue, including blood vessels, bone cells, and perhaps even blood cells, was so well preserved that it was still stretchy and flexible.
A scanning electron microscope revealed that the dinosaur blood vessels, which are 70 million years old, are virtually identical to those recovered from modern ostrich bones. The ostrich is today’s largest bird, and many paleontologists believe that birds are the living descendants of dinosaurs. Scientists may be able to confirm this evolutionary relationship if they can isolate certain proteins from the recently discovered T. rex tissue. These proteins could also help solve another puzzle: whether dinosaurs were cold-blooded like other reptiles or warm-blooded like mammals.
Does this discovery of soft dinosaur tissue mean that scientists will soon be able to clone a Tyrannosaurus rex? Probably not — most scientists believe that DNA cannot survive for 70 million years. Then again, before this discovery, most scientists believed that soft tissue could not survive for 70 million years either.
remember Network? “I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!”
Olbermann received a package of white powder the other day. He ended up spending 10 hours in a sealed hospital room while they ran an analysis on the powder, (which turned out to be soap flakes), then he was told not to talk about it. So he talked about it. I’m on his team because he’s on ours.
jusst a quick not before I sleep: You Are Invited
Tomorrow afternoon, (around 2-ish), Sara and I are going to go gleefully and reverently explore the BodyWorlds exhibit at Scienceworld.
Also on my things-to-do: Pay more attention to the Vancouver International Film Festival.
I heard tell that the promising looking sci-fi Rennasaince, the Michel Gondry film, The Science of Sleep, (director of Spotless Mind, among other things), and the new Mamoru Oshii, (Ghost in the Shell), Tachigui: The Amazing Lives of the Fast Food Grifters, will all be playing at the festival, unlikely to ever return.
Sam’s arranging a group to go to Tachigui this Saturday afternoon, September 30, for 2:30pm at the Granville, (tickets are $7.50), and Kyle and I have October 11th tickets for The Fountain, which costs about $10, but I haven’t looked into the other shows yet. I’m too bloody tired at the moment. If anyone’s got any preferred times and dates, please, tell me and I’ll see about posting them. (As well, of course, as attending).
tomorrow I start work & dance for DJ Krush
Another lonely night and I feel like a bad rip-off of a well crafted pop song. When does the hurting subside? It’s like I’m going to rhyme. Oh, too late. I’m repressing the urge to swear now in spite of the fact that this is text and I could always go back and edit all that out. Stress talking, stress guiding my fingers over the keys. They’re half worn away on this keyboard, letters and fingers both.
It reminds me of the root of scrupulous, being the Latin for a tiny stone that was the smallest unit of weight. Thus, a scrupulous person was a person so sensitive they’re irritated by the smallest stone in their shoe. It reminds me of the unintentional pacing of our lives with poetry that happens all the time. Bless used to mean to redden with blood as in sacrifice, giving a nice mental picture to the common western response to a sneeze. These are the things that occur to me late at night, when my topic tracking gets shaky, when I can’t pick threads so easily from the loom of my mental perspicacity. Loom, what navigators at sea call the halo of lights.
Which makes me think of celestial navigation, (celestial – residing in the heaven), which translates basically to pretending you know where you are until you’ve proved all your fictions wrong and you actually know where you’re bobbing on the ocean, which leads me to both treacherous waters, (Seattle, that bridge, meeting Eliza), and watching all those shooting-stars shining at Clinton, (just the faintest smudge of finger-painted Northern Lights on the edge of the sky). Two things that bring me back to my sudden ex-relationship.
I think it’s going to prove to be a long night. Counting sheep means tooling about on the internet, digging up articles on the first zero-gravity surgery set to be performed and useless first-world restaurants. I think I want to walk out my door too much, arrive at a house up the road a bit and to the left, (always my joking directions to find the g-spot), knock at the door and see myself reflected in a pair of welcoming eyes. (Seeing that effect, the Roman’s created the word pupil, which comes from little doll). This is my brain pretending to know where it is. This is my heart pretending that I haven’t been breaking down crying every day, the classic sextant based three-star triangle giving me a space the size of a city block, his block. The one with the house that I dangerously dreamed was orange and liked me. Something about driving on the wrong side of the street. I picked out the right paint chip and scared us.
Memories that I need to learn to dull. There is enough about poetry in my head to know that life’s seductive habits can be broken at will. I need to shepherd myself, write a palinode, relocate emotionally back into the damage, out of the alluring panoramic idea that I would get away with being allowed to do otherwise. That’s the worst, knowing I don’t need to love someone, that it’s just bloody nice to have something alive and pure and nice, (from the Latin nescīre, meaning to be ignorant). Needs are air, water. A place to sleep alone, (meaning unwanted, not desired, and dispensable).
one of my favourite places to be “oh jesus christ” “oh god”
Today I started a letter-book with Troll. A place to house our invisible secrets. My new schedule means that I will never see him now, which leaves all delivery of the book to third parties. I dearly hope, for this especially, the network does not fail.
from we-make-money-not-art:
The Blind Camera, by Sascha Pohflepp, a contributor to We-Make-Money-Not-Art and new media artist based in Berlin, captures a moment at the press of a button. Note that, a moment, not a picture. The device has no optical parts. Instead, the camera records only the time you depress the shutter button and immediately searches the net for other photos that have been taken in the exact same moment.
“Essentially, it is a camera that only takes photos that were created by someone who pressed a button somewhere else at that very time as its own button was pressed.”
After a few minutes or hours, depending on how soon someone else shares their photo on the web, an image will appear on the screen. In a way, it belongs half to the person who had pressed the button and still remembers that moment. Because of that connection, the photos are never dismissed as random, no matter how enigmatic they may be.