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Monday, January 31, 2005
ORIGINS OF CYBERSPACE
posted
8:10 AM
Dang. Hurts a guy's feelings: I read through this whole Origins Of Cyberspace auction at Christie's, waiting for that essential Gollancz first of Neuromancer to pop up, but no...no...


It's a pretty interesting catalog nonetheless, photos of lots of great Babbageiana and whatnot. Definitely worth a look if you're interesting in the history of computation.

Sunday, January 30, 2005
WEBCAMS
posted
2:52 PM
Fantastically boring, or boringly fantastic?

Random Live Webcams



Tuesday, January 25, 2005
DISTURBING
posted
8:53 PM
Finally: a site that tracks and documents those *really* special eBay items! And the next time you run across one (anybody else remember the Ghost In A Bottle?) you can add it to the trove!

Yes, it's...Disturbing Auctions!

Don't miss the "UPS Driver Sculpture". Not easily forgotten, no.

[spotted by my wife, thanks]


Saturday, January 22, 2005
BOY
posted
2:45 PM
Number Three in our New York/London Reflectopron Series: A statue of Boy George costumed as the late Leigh Bowery. Yes it is.



And that's the excellent Paul McAuley off to the side.

Friday, January 21, 2005
JERKFACE
posted
3:33 PM
Jerkface of Houston Street, January 2005:



JERKFACE$
*EST
MANHAN*LING
AND
HOSTILE TAKEOVERS
INTERN*T[?]

Appointments *not* always necessary!

Thursday, January 20, 2005
MUDWIG
posted
10:41 PM
Mudwig is a twit.



An as-yet ungentrified doorway in Brick Lane, last Sunday.

Tuesday, January 11, 2005
HEAVY WEATHER
posted
2:43 PM
Heavy weather:



I'm off to New York tomorrow, briefly, then on to London, in search of...inspiration.

Saturday, January 08, 2005
FROSTY
posted
7:37 PM
And as the magic of the year's first snowfall morphs rainy Vancouver into a
Winter Wonderland...



[photo by Robin Kirk]

SOCIALIST HAIR
posted
3:37 PM
Let Us Trim Our Hair In Accordance With Socialist Lifestyle!

'It stressed the "negative effects" of long hair on "human intelligence development", noting that long hair "consumes a great deal of nutrition" and could thus rob the brain of energy.'

Friday, January 07, 2005
NIGHTRIDERS
posted
9:14 PM
From still further down in the same memory-hole that afflicted that Lexington newspaper, this New York Times story:

First Murder Charge in '64 Civil Rights Killings of 3
Robert D. McFadden with Jerry Mitchell & Michelle O'Donnell | New York & Mississippi | January 7

NYT - The most infamous unresolved case from America's civil rights struggle four decades ago - the 1964 abduction and killing of three voter-registration volunteers by nightriders on a lonely rural road in Mississippi - was revived last night with the arrest of a longtime leader of the Ku Klux Klan, the authorities announced.

The suspect, Edgar Ray Killen, a 79-year-old preacher who, investigators say, organized and led two carloads of Klansmen on the night of the killings, was arrested at his home in Philadelphia, Miss., and charged with the murders of Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman and James Chaney, Sheriff Larry Myers of Neshoba County said. The sheriff also said there would be more arrests in the notorious case, which helped to cement Mississippi's image as a haven of hatred and violence in the 1960's.


BUGGERY BOMB
posted
8:54 PM
The Buggery Bomb, and other Burroughsian delights

BTW, does the failure of WWII's "Who Me?" fecal-odor secret weapon indicate that the Germans were the ones who quite utterly failed to find fecal odors offensive? Inquiring minds definitely need to know.

Thursday, January 06, 2005
KENTUCKYAN
posted
4:01 PM
Kentuckyan Jack Womack writes:

"Saw that when it first appeared. They actually interviewed me for the followup, as I had emailed the reporter to congratulate them for actually doing the piece in the first place, considering the guff I know they got from old Lexingtonians in return. As I was able to tell from our last trip down, in April, out-of-towners and contemporary Lexingtonians finally outnumber the old lawn-jockey-in-the-front-yard sort, and the place is far the better for it..."

My own maternal grandmother, a very old lady when I was a small boy, made a point of finding the expression "the Civil War" offensive, insisting on calling it "the war of the northern invasion".

MEMORY HOLE
posted
10:38 AM
Serious memory-hole action in Lexington, Kentucky: local newspaper suddenly remembers neglecting to ever have even mentioned the entire civil rights movement, apologizes for same. As reported today in the Washington Post.

Wednesday, January 05, 2005
TORTURE LAWYER
posted
10:57 AM
Josh Marshall has a way of inducing these moments of hallicinatory meta-political clarity:

"Here's a question -- one I don't know the answer to, but one which I suspect may have an uncomfortable answer. We know that Al Gonzales has been White House Counsel for the last four years and that he's played an instrumental role in several legal findings and memos which have given legal sanction to torture (or what I guess we might call 'the act formerly known as torture'). What if Gonzales had had some roughly equivalent position in Argentina or Chile in the late 1970s? Would he have faced subsequent legal vulnerability and/or consequences?"





Monday, January 03, 2005
EMPEROR OF AMERICA
posted
6:39 PM
And please help James W. Johnson become Emperor of America.





Sunday, January 02, 2005
TOP FIVE
posted
4:56 PM
If the death-toll reaches 200,000, which doesn't seem unlikely, the tsunami will rank among the top five deadliest recorded disasters.






JAMES
posted
3:57 PM
"I am done with great things and big plans, great institutions and big success. I am for those tiny, invisible loving human forces that work from individual to individual, creeping through the crannies of the world like so many rootlets, or like the capillary oozing of water, which, if given time, will rend the hardest monuments of pride."
--William James

Saturday, January 01, 2005
STETSON
posted
5:28 PM
A New Year's new hat for Splitcoil:



OOPS!
posted
4:35 PM
Oops... It looks as though you may have to be an actual Canadian in order to have the Canadian government match your donation, as I stated here recently. I'm not entirely certain of how this would work in practice, however, as there are Canadians all over the world, all of whom should qualify to have their donations matched, and I've read that the great majority of donations are being made via the Internet. I suspect that the government's qualification may come after the fact of someone having not fully worked out the implications of the quasi-post-geographical nature of the present (happens to the best of us): They may simply not be expecting non-Canadians to start donating via .ca charities.