I can hear a rat scraping around in the back of the store. I want it to be my friend.

Passion-Hill, a very delightfully wrong Benny Hill/Passion of the Christ mash-up that confirms every little inner voice belief I had telling me never to watch the film.

The miracle of the clean water straw, the lingering joy of the discoving that people in little villages in africa have the habit of climbing trees to get better reception for their cell phones, these ideas were connecting in my mind this morning. I walked to work with the flavour of the future in my head. I’m curious to know who would be interested in starting a coffee-house discussion group on things like social networks inter-reacting with technology, the internet, and what we’re doing with our journals. There’s been a lot of talk lately about using the net as a tool, but I look around and never find enough people doing it. Honestly, I don’t have a lot of time to set aside for this sort of thing, but I’m willing to give it a try. I don’t want moderated discussions or weekly topics or anything regulated, I would rather let people spill what they’ve discovered that week and give them feed-back. I want motivations, clouded or otherwise, for keeping a journal. I want explanations, links to the news that changed your perpective on what the internet offers you. I talk about this sort of thing all the time in my every day but it hardly comes up here. I’d like that to change. Game?

When the zombies come, swords don’t run out of bullets. They’re going to be having a cane-fighting workshop come next Sunday.

I’m bleeding dye

  • British woman weds dolphin.

    Something about me wants to learn how to sing soul music, that drum machine spoken word that focuses on notes like inspiration and cleverly explains every bar-tab feeling that love ever wracks up inside our hearts. These words aren’t enough some days. I desire chords. I keep being put on the spot next to pianos and feeling entirely inadequate as my tongue searches for something I know all the lyrics to. I’ve lost all my known songs, all I’ve got left are children’s tunes and the thin skin of pop songs that don’t stand up to scrutiny. A man suddenly startles from a couch. “You’re not a musician are you? That would be a shame.” “No, I’m not. Really I’m not. Why would that be so bad?” “I would haff to stop what I’m doing right now if you are.” “What?” “I don’t let myself ever do this with musicians.” Understanding glitters in her mind and her lips quirk. They laugh while the others look on uncomprehendingly. He leans back, settles his head back on the pillow, and she continues to be pleased. I wanted to sing. I swear. Please believe me. I would give up every ounce of hesitation I showed so that you could have had me sing for you. Hands on the keys and I felt like magic was real. I felt like I remembered, the first time I left for the city, the first time I met you. I will never stop wishing you’d called. The phone silent in my pocket felt like a John Cage piece. Four hours and thirty three seconds before I step on a plane marked only by the absence of vibration, of tone, of hello where do we meet. Those hands, so slight, pulling rabbits from my jaded hat. Sound.

  • Second chord sounds in world’s longest lasting concert.

    Does anyone have a scanner? I have a lovely Polaroid of Andrew, Mike and myself that I insisted be taken by an unkempt vagrant downtown who was wandering around asking tourists to pose for a fee. We’re standing in the middle of Grandville street at night looking like nothing better than drunk kids. I would like to have a digital copy of before anything strange happens to it. I’ve never had a Polaroid before and I’m pretty sure I’ve never looked like a yuppie’s girlfriend before either. The novelty is slightly addictive. I want to wear it in my hat like an antique PRESS pass and ignore people who stare at me on the metro.

  • John McDaid’s brilliant sci-fi story Keyboard Practice is now free online.

    Larry called on Friday while he was driving down the highway home. We fell immediately into comfortable conversation. I was glad, still am. I’ve been feeling him as living farther away lately, no matter that Missouri’s a hell of a lot closer than Paris, because the frequency of his posts dropped lately and there’s been less content. My distances are measured in information, not geography. Every letter typed is a drop in a river. I don’t have to close my eyes at night to see it. I can be walking barefoot through cold mud, whirling glittering scarves over my head, and think, ah, so-and-so would like to do this with me. I can tell. They write that way. As I was discussing with Rick, on the bus Sunday, grammar and punctuation can mean so much on-line. The entire language changes to make up for body-language, for visual cues. Sentence structure is suddenly crucial in a way that doesn’t effect speech. Typing the word “like” or “um” every three words is unacceptable, though I’m sure we say them more often than we’d like to admit. Spelling takes on the measure of your education, typos of your intelligence. Code overshadows everything read, as LOL translates to “well that was enough to make me smile”. It makes me wonder how well I transliterate to page. I’m told that I smile more in person than on-line, but that my typos are less. What about you?

  • India is missing about 10 million daughters since the widespread use of ultrasound, estimates a new study.
  • do you ever get the feeling? (time runs faster on-line)

    The Flickr Hot Tags yesterday were all related to England. The list ran something like “londonbomb, londonbombblasts, explosions, london, blasts” etcetera.

    Today they are, in order, sextaposer, sexta, sflickr, furryfriday, swoon, and then londonbombings.

    Obviously, there is something inferred here of which I am unawares but unwilling to click on to find out. You do it. It might be innocent.

    As an apology, here’s an android portrait of Phillip K. Dick.

    Also, a picture of a young girl petting a trouser ferret.

    society explains? someone help me ponder please

    On-line, I rant less at people about how wonderful technology is, but I’ve been coming to an odd conclusion lately that I want to share; that language just might be devolving through the internet. I don’t mean so much words like WOOT coming into parlance, but that vocabulary is homogenizing. Meeting international friends has only added credence to this idea. No matter where in the world they are from, we are all speaking the same language.

    I’m talking about expression through memetics, hyperbolic emphasis.

    It’s like somehow we’re managing to slim down language to something that’s almost electronic gesture based, so non-specific that we’re reaching a plateau of zen communication that’s partially worrisome. The inflections that span oceans because we read the same news stories and know each other almost purely by interest have not been complex ideas. The common denominators are almost startlingly like a severe Californian infection once they’re noticed. Berkley as patient zero. Home culture barely impacts. We all say “like” and “yeah” smattered with the occasional “I win” acknowledgment of clever. We seem to be erasing language with porous words, as meaningless as the most commonly known word in the world, “okay”.