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OncoMouse

Page history last edited by PBworks 16 years, 2 months ago

Oncomouse's Blog

 

Other Oncomouse Information:

 

01.29.2008

 

I'm thinking that I should start blogging, again. There are things that no longer seem appropriate (or are too long) for Facebook status updates and I miss having a forum to express myself.

 

Anyway, the major source of strife (and ranting) in my life has been the Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board. I was all set to order a bottle of Lemon Hart Demerara Rum from a wine purveyor in California, as the PCLB refuses to stock the rum (which makes sense, as I'm probably one of 10 people in the state who would probably buy a bottle). Anyway, it turns out that it is also illegal to order liquor that isn't stocked by the board over the Internet. In other words, there is no legal way I can purchase this spirit.

 

Doing some more research, I turned up the PCLB's new "direct buying" program which allows you to order wine from a "partner" vineyard and have it shipped to your local Wine & Spirit store. In addition to any shipping costs, you have to pay the states 24% liquor tax (6% sales + 18% liquor) and you have to pay $4.50 in "handling" (presumably to cover the expanse of moving the wine box from the loading dock to the cash register).

 

Also, as a fun tidbit, the 18% liquor tax was levied to pay for the Johnstown Flood. You remember that? It was horrible and happened in the 1930s. While the tax situation is absurd, there are so many problems with the current system.

 

With a 24% tax, a pathetic stock list, the fact that every store is required by law to stock the same things (I'm sure they sell a lot of Glenlivet in economically depressed central PA), and the fact that the service staff is forbidden by law from making product recommendations, no wonder people hate the PCLB. There has to be a better way to buy your liquor, right?

 

Of course there is for most of the population of the state: an estimate I found online suggested that over 25% of all alcohol consumed in PA was purchased on the other side of the border. The PCLB has done a lot to enrich the state's neighbors: "total sales of wine and liquor are 40 percent higher in New Jersey than in Pennsylvania, whose population is 50 percent larger," writes an enlightening New York Times article.

 

That's all well and good for the fat cats in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh (whose residents do a similarly brisk business with Ohio liquor stores), but what are those of us in the center of the state (largely the poorest part, as well) to do?

 

Well, I calculated it, because I was curious: to Shopper's Vineyard in Clifton, NJ, it's a 227 trip from State College. My car gets 30 mpg or so and at $3.10 a gallon, I would spend $47 on gas just driving, not to mention the damage to the environment and my car.

 

More to come


 

12.04.2007

 

So, in case you aren't on Facebook, I got engaged today. I'm really excited (despite the sticker shock of a ring). Shawna and I are getting married in May, 2009, which is the first time we will both be free from teaching and finished comps.

 

OncoMouse: I swear mobius just thought to heemself this mornin': I'll bet Andrew and Shawna are going to get married soon. May your nuptials (and, more importantly, your marriage) continue to be blessed by the noosphere ( and collards!) - mobius


 

12.03.2007

 

It's either this bag or an espresso maker, as far as super expensive luxury items to get me for Christmas.

 

In other news, I made one of my favorite foods in the entire world, collard greens, for dinner last night. Delicious. That website I link to is really cool and goes into the history of the dish (turns out it is African in origin) and sheds some interesting light on how the whole menagerie of Southern cooking got started.

 

Anyway, most of my other green cooking experiments have ended in bitter greens and tears. After seeing a buying frenzy at home this Thanksgiving (two huge vats of iced collard greens at $2.00 for five pounds), I realized that collard greens are a Southern Thanksgiving tradition I wanted a part of. I ended up being the only white person in The Dekalb Farmer's Market (aka the happiest place on Earth aka Epcot for foodies) running around with an armload of collard greens. Getting home, I realized I'd just purchased five pounds of sandy, tough, bitter vegetables that I had no idea how to cook.

 

Reading on the Internet and in some of mom's cookbooks, I learned that every collard greens recipe has only four ingredients: water, salt, smoked pork, and greens. The version I ended up using also had oil, but here's the basic idea:

 

Step 1: Brown one hamhock per 3.5-5 pounds of greens in 1T of olive oil (per hock). Try to brown it on all sides and let some of the fat render. Do this in a stock pot.

 

Step 2: Add one scant T and 8 cups water per 3.5-5 pounds of greens to pot. Bring to a boil and simmer on medium-low for 30 minutes. If you want spicier greens, you can add some dried red peppers during this simmering.

 

Step 3: While the stock is boiling, wash the collard greens in a sink full of water, replacing the water and re-washing the greens until the water is clear. Now, take the stems out of the collard greens. You are going to want to cut as much of the white ribs out of the leaves as you can. I usually cut along both edges with a knife and then snip it off near the top of the leaf. Cut the leaves into 1" thick ribbons (and halve some of the longer ribbons).

 

Step 4: After the stock is finished simmering, begin adding the collards. You are going to want to do this in handfuls. Drop in some of the greens, and stir them around to blanch them (they will turn a brighter green). When they have wilted, add another handful. Repeat until all the greens are in the pot. Bring the water to a boil over high, again. Turn down low and simmer, gently for around an hour. The greens are done when they are completely tender and no longer taste bitter.

 

To do these up right, you really should serve them with pepper vinegar, but because we live in a godless, heathen state, they don't sell pepper vinegar here. I made them hotter and added vinegar.


 

11.30.2007

Holy crap, it's Damo Suzuki playing with Bardo Pond!:

 


 

11.28.2007

I usually try to avoid talking about football on here because I can see my friends' eyes glaze over when I start talking about "i formations" and "pulling guards". Sadly, I'm going to talk about football.

 

I'm bored, tonight, and was watching videos on Youtube of double wing football teams when I came across this video:

 

 

This is a collection of game footage from some team (I think it might be Michigan) running the single wing. I was struck that a lot of this stuff looks like the shotgun spread option offense Urban Meyer is running with Tim Tebow down at the University of Florida (watch the clips where he's running the football):

 

 

While this looks a lot like the old stuff, it's pretty different (as illustrated by all the throwing). Nonetheless, Tim Tebow became the first quarterback in history to run for 20 touchdowns and pass for 20 touchdowns in one season. Actually, last season, they even lined up in a single wing formation a few times.

 

Additionally, I've been noticing that teams like Clemson and Missouri have started to incorporate elements of the single wing into their offense. Specifically, one of the hot trends in football this year (in addition to 5 wide shotgun sets, which work well for Chase Daniels at Missouri and not so well for our own Anthony Morrelli) is to always have a slot receiver motioning into an end around. What this means is that, when Clemson runs up the middle, the quarterback will hand off to the tailback and then drop back and fake a hand off to the receiver coming off the side. Then, when they want to run an end around, they fake the first hand off and hand off to the slot receiver. Classic single wing.

 

I really like that, nowadays, in college ball, the quest to be new and exciting and win lots of games is being routed through really old school football.

 

Okay, enough about football.


 

11.26.2007

 

I decided not to blog over Thanksgiving, as I was pouring most of my textual production into the black hole that is my SF paper. Nonetheless, a lot of interesting stuff happened and I will probably talk about a lot of it in the next few days.

 

The thing I wanted to open with, though, is how and why I will never complain about it raining in State College, again (well, at least I don't think I'll complain quite as much or ever actually mean it). I went home to Atlanta, where there has been a drought for the last year or so (at least). The region is over 16" behind the average rainfall and will run completely out of drinking water in February. While most of the city is unconcerned (with some of my parent's neighbors still watering their lawns under the cover of night), my parents are going forward with the whole shortage mentality (we are watering our yard with dirty washing machine water). I have to say the whole experience was a little unnerving. We were only able to shower every other day, and only flushing the toilet once a day. You don't really think about things like water until you are operating without them.

 

I'm more worried, though, about my parents. With water running out, no one is really sure where replacement water is going to come from (the governor is too busy praying for rain on the Capitol steps to worry about things like that). To make matters worse, the Atlanta police department has been laying off people for years to meet ever tighter budgets and our National Guard has been deployed in Iraq for a long time. If things were to go pear shaped, as Charles Stross likes to say, I would be most worried that Blackwater would end up being deployed in Atlanta, as they were, in New Orleans, following Hurricane Katrina.

 

As a lot of nothern papers are reporting, all of this is Atlanta's fault: unbridled, unchecked development and no plan for water usage. What does this critique give us? As with my students who learned a lesson about audience when they claimed that it was the people on the Gulf Coast's fault for living in a hurricane prone area (my response: "you mean people like my grandparents?"), I'm finding that, once again, people don't care about the suffering of others' (I just wish it didn't keep happening to people I care about)...

 

More to come


 

11.09.2007

Following on (sort of) thepanamaslider's really smart post (mostly because citing good work is a way to boast the credibility of shoddy work), I was off on a weird info-quest this morning after Amazon recommended Endgame: the Blueprint For Global Enslavement (which means I'm probably now on some sort of watch list). Anyway, I began reading about Alex Jones. While I could go on about his whole conspiracy thing, I thought it was more interesting that he is the guy with the bullhorn who gets tassed (sp?) in A Scanner Darkly. Anyway, this led to reading about Bohemian Grove, The Bilderberg Group, and The Trilateral Commission. I've realized that I prefer the lizards walking amongst us variety of conspiracy theories. I suppose it's because if our world really is being ruled by a monstrous elite, I'd like it to be a really implausible one. Also, because giant lizards sound a lot more like the description of the Nova Mob in Burroughs and things that make Burroughs "right" are always a plus in my book.

 

Nonetheless, all of this confirms that I really need to read Jon Ronson's books over summer (or possibly Christmas).


 

11.05.2007

I have a lot of thoughts about SLSA, but I wanted to specifically speak about a breakthrough (of sorts) that occurred at the conference. So much of the program of the conference was tied up in a rhetoric of the new: what does hypertext mean? what are texts? how do we read, now? Things like that. With all of this rhetoric of newness, I began to wonder why we still asked these questions in a transmission model of data exchange: sitting still and listening.

I took the above picture with my iPhone during N. Katherine Hayles's presentation on biocomplexity, flocking, and the hyper-novel (my term, not hers) (she's the small dark blur near the middle of the photo, next to the bald dude). While there was all of this reasonable summary of Stephen Wolfram's work on cellular automata, she transformed this thinking into a model of reading and an interpretive framework for hypertext. Whoopee! More interpretation!

 

More troubling, though, was the fact that we set (quietly) and listened to this talk, with everyone facing her and no one questioning (the q&a was a complete love-fest). Fine, whatever, no one really likes academic talks anyway.

 

Then I saw Trey Connor give a talk entitled “The Protos Chronos and the Figure of Compression: Code and Coda,” which had something to do with the relationship between rhetoric, LaMonte Young (!), and computer programming. The important thing, though, is that his presentation had no notes, no thesis, and involved lots of audience interaction. He walked around the room, he handed out musical instruments to play with, and he had us perform Young's "Composition 1960 #10" (whose sole instruction is "draw a straight line and follow it"). There was no anal-retentive division between "theory" and "example". There was no plot summary. There was nothing resembling linearity or even a division between speaker and audience (Trey was the only presenter on his panel who wouldn't sit in the front before and after his paper). While I'm not arguing for this rambling approach to scholarship, what I do want to stress is that if we are going to claim that we are doing something new, shouldn't we actually try and experiment with new models of criticism?

 

I have to say, over the weekend, all of the best papers I saw were similar strolls (which is, I think, the critical methodology I'm striving for (esp. with the paper I gave entitled “Utopia.com: Fredric Jameson and Piracy Online”)). In addition to Trey's, Joan Richardson's “Resounding Invisibility” on questions of consciousness raised by Richard Powers's late novels was equally as much a wandering account of what it means to think. If so much of what we do is "I find this shit cool" (as a critical method), shouldn't our work actually strive to be a collection of interlinking cool things? While I'm sure the people who gave plot summaries (I saw one of Neuromancer and another of Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature, amongst others) find their subjects cool, what's the point if you can't connect it to something else, especially in these networked times? As much as I've been bristling against D&G, I think that tracing the rhizome has to be the critical method of the future and that the idea of the presenter/audience binary should be blurred more.

 

Nonetheless, it was invigorating weekend (despite the hurricane) and I had a blast.


 

 

10.31.2007

I don't really know what "the gusto" would be today, but I really feel like going for it. I apologize for the five days without posts following the one-a-day regimen we had all been on. I find that I go through phases of logomania.

 

I've become kind of bored, lately. I don't know why, and hopefully attending SLSA this weekend will get me out of some of this funk, but I just feel, like Calvin, that every day is the same. Maybe I do need a space helmet.


 

10.26.2007 12:16pm

Intelligent Design: I'm researching stuff to add to my comps list and I got linked, by Amazon, to a bunch of books on intelligent design (apparently Frank J. Tipler followed The Physics of Immortality (in which Man becomes God) with The Physics of Christianity (which derives God from Physical laws)). One of these books, Genetic Entropy & the Mystery of the Genome, lays out the theory of genetic entropy (which was popular in that whole Dover, PA thing) which states that evolution couldn't have happened because entropy suggests that genetic code would deteriorate over time. I've been told that this argument can be demolished by anyone with a basic understanding of thermodynamics (which I don't have), but that isn't the point. All the Christians who get offended by other ideas (I won't start, I promise), run this argument in court. The problem, though, might become apparent, if you click the link for the book (go on, click it). There's a UFO on the cover. A book about intelligent design with the space ship from Close Encounters of the Third Kind. I ask you: is God a UFO?


 

10.25.2007 5:34pm

A rare class-related blog:

 

I really dislike the story of A Scanner Darkly. This is the second time I've read/seen it this semester and both times I've found it just unbelievably upsetting. My main problem with the novel, though, has more to do with its deployment of tragedy than with any specific characteristics of the plot. While I don't really find Arctor (or anyone else, for that matter) compelling, any story in which a character is fated to die from the beginning and is enable to escape his destiny troubles me, greatly. I think part of my interest in the transhuman (see below) stems from this problem with destiny: I see transhumanism as the possibility of subverting the consumption->production cycle that marks all stages of capitalism. Maybe, just maybe, we can escape from this doomed existence. Probably not, though, but at least we have hope. I think this would be my largest problem with Dick in general, in most of his novels, is his inability to offer hope of any sort. We are always trapped in an invisible cage in his books (even his transhuman novels, like The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch). While there's nothing wrong with hopelessness per se (I mean dystopian SF writers make a living on this stuff), I, personally, don't see the reason. If all the future is going to be is an intensification of the present, then we may as well blow ourselves up now. Despite all the world-weary cynicism that (I've been told) creeps into this blog, I fundamentally think this world and the people on it are worth saving and I believe that the future may be better. I realize that, as post-structuralists, we should be suspicious of my claims of sincerity (again, see below). I don't know, maybe this is reading too much into A Scanner Darkly, but I really am troubled by the utter hopelessness the book/movie is capable of engendering.


 

10.25.2007 1:05pm

I'm wondering about transhumanism at the moment, and this sort of relates to a paper I'm writing for another class. Is transhumanism a return to salvation history, in the sense that Donna Haraway uses the term in "A Cyborg Manifesto"? Moreover, can we ever get out of the salvation narrative? Haraway suggests that the cyborg itself is an escape from salvation history (at least in its nuclear telos), but almost immediately following the Manifesto's publication, the arrival of the cyborg become a kind of salvation narrative. Similarly, one could argue (and I plan on arguing) that J.G. Ballard's early post-human novels (Crash, High-Rise, etc.) themselves see the arrival of this post-human as a kind of salvation from the evacuated media landscape of the postmodern. In this paper, I'm thinking that I plan on arguing for a new sincerity (or affirmation) occurring within the pages of contemporary science fiction (namely the recent work of Charles Stross and William Gibson (and maybe Chris Moriarty)). While I think these novels are outside the salvation narrative, the angry cousin of the new sincerity has to be the transhuman salvation narrative, in which the coming technological singularity is viewed in terms that could be argued as religious. I'm thinking of the novels of Joe Haldeman and, maybe, Doctorow's Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom as examples of these salvation histories (or salvation porn could be another possible term).

 

Nonetheless, as someone writing a dissertation on transhumanism, I'm starting to realize that this project is going to have to grapple with the problem that the transhuman is viewed as a secular salvation narrative (I think this pops up in early stuff and later texts). I guess, I'll leave it open, but I'm wondering how to get out of this problem. Or even if we should.


 

10.24.2007 10:04am

I was thinking this morning, over breakfast, about government mascots. For various programs, you have characters like Woodsy the Owl or Smokey the Bear or Rex the Mountain Lion (who teaches kids about how to be ready for terrorism). These guys are cool (well, Smokey is a total badass, at least). Anyway, the point of all this is that I think the whole privacy, anti-control thing needs a mascot, too. It would teach kids about the importance of privacy, free speech, and mistrusting the government. What would this character be called? I would like to propose The Anony-moose as the new cartoon mascot.

 

Anony-moose says:

 

Think about it: you know it would be awesome.

 

Hahahahahahahahaha. I was going to write a thought-provoking, insightful comment in response to this. But all I can come up with is... hahahahahaha. Brilliant. - zee_deveel


 

10.23.2007 3:15pm

 

It's a complicated breadcrumb trail tracing back how I found the video above (I could have clicked on it in my RSS viewer this morning when it went up on BoingBoing but didn't), but suffice it to say that web browsing is (only slightly) more interesting than _A Thousand Plateaus_ (which is saying something: it's nice to read a D&G book I actually, mostly enjoy reading).

 

Anyway, this video is by Mike Wesch and the students in his Mediated Cultures group. Interesting stuff. I like the idea of the collaborative survey, but I'm left wondering, as a teacher who still sort of cares, how does on go about doing this sort of stuff? I can see my students' eyes glaze over in class. I see them browsing on ESPN. I don't entirely mind because, frankly, I've got other things to be doing. It's not that I'm not interested in the material, but I just don't know how to convey complicated material in a way that isn't based on the banking model of pedagogy, as that is the media ecology in which I grew up. Especially when my students are all engineers who are as uninterested in tech writing as I was when I was a junior computer science major.

 

So, that was one take away from this video: I'm getting sick of reading digital pedagogy theory that is very good at diagnosing the problem. I know that we don't reach students, that classrooms are designed around a 19th century deposit model, and that education is generally not reaching these people (who read 8 books a year (which is ... sad (I think I've read 8 books this month))). When it comes to practical ideas, it seems as though the literature is less forthcoming. I think this is partly true because of the rarefied nature of all academic discourse. Theory is sexy, practice is suspect and smells like objectivity or science (two things that are big and scary to people who grew up in the humanities).

 

Another side note that I think relates. At the end of the video, there is text claiming (I really love the Marshall McLuhan quote at the beginning, btw) that "technology can save us" or some such. Save us from what? That's such alarmist garbage. I feel like I need to ask the question again: what is technology supposed to save us from? Our students? Our mundane lives? Our classrooms? Oppression? Fascism? What does that mean? Why do we need saving? I figure if we keep on like we are going, the whole thing will eventually, spectacularly fall apart on its own and that seems to suggest a much more productive process (I'm thinking of the discussion of the origin of the Bitchun Society in Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom).

 

One thing I was thinking, though, is about these horrible class room spaces documented in this video. I'm teaching in Burrowes 216 which is supposed to be a classroom-of-the-future, but, really, it only ends up looking like a conference room. So, I've gotten out of the 19th century and into a corporate netherworld. Moreover, how does the change of the classroom facilitate this new pedagogy Wesch seems to be arguing for (without actually saying so (which is sneaky))? While sitting in a circle and holding hands is all well and good, I think the notion of information disseminating is still an important pedagogical function. It's part of the problem with the D&G seminar this semester (to return to the beginning (as if we ever left)). When grappling with one of the more difficult bodies of work of the 20th century, the possibility of sitting in a circle and listening to what people feel about the text is completely unproductive. You would think after 8 weeks of class they would stop saying the same fucking things over and over again, asking the same nauseating questions: in fact, no. As much as I applaud Jeff for trying to facilitate classroom discussion, I think this material might actually be better served by a 19th century architecture. With D&G, I think there isn't really anything productively accomplished by student centered teaching: I don't want to know about how the body without organs makes you feel.

 

To now move completely off topic, I think this whole thing is why I'm really ready to be done with seminars. I'm so sick and tired of hearing what other people have to say when, really, they have nothing to say at all. I may be breaking some kind of taboo here, but I'm just so sick of other people, right now. If I have to listen to one more personal anecdote being deployed as an example of why my theoretically sophisticated argument is wrong, I may just scream. Like, really scream. It's come close a couple of times in the last week.

 

But, anyway, pedagogy.


 

10.22.2007 3:14pm

Adding on to thepanamaslider's post, I wanted to point out that I saw that helicopter land on the baseball diamond on Park Avenue as I was coming into school (it was red, right?). Anyway, that helicopter produced thoughts of a different order for me (in contrast to thepanamaslider's paranoia).

 

Over the summer, I was being lazy, and Shawna was getting ready to go to the grocery store. She asked if I wanted to go and, being lazy, I said "no thanks." About 20 minutes later, she called me from the road and said:

 

"I just saw a helicopter crash."

 

Incredulously I replied, "Excuse me?"

 

"Yeah, it was in the old Lowe's parking lot. I saw this helicopter flying around and thought 'helicopters don't usually fly that low' then I realized that helicopters also aren't usually on fire and billowing smoke. It kept flying lower, cut the top of a tree off, and hit the pavement. Then it exploded. I was going to stop and help, but I wasn't really sure what one does in the case of helicopter explosion, so I kept driving. I passed a fire truck right after that."

 

The moral of this story: always go to the grocery store with your girl/boy-friend.


 

10.21.2007 11:04pm

 

I installed Ubuntu 7.10 ("Gutsy Gibbon") on my "old" AMD64 small form factor computer I loving refer to as "the helicopter, taking off" (due to the high number of fans in its tiny frame). Anyway, I had stopped using it after the purchase of a Powerbook and the failure of the 'copter to boot in either Window XP or the version of Gentoo I was running. Anyway, we've been thinking about installing Ubuntu on Shawna's laptop due to the general inability of Windows Vista to not suck. I have to say I was a little skeptical. First off, most of my experiences with Linux have ended in tears (the 'copter was just the most recent). Secondly, the 'copter specifically failed because of the failure of the Linux drivers for the ethernet card onboard the NForce3 motherboards to connect to the Internet (seemingly a basic function).

 

Before we put Ubuntu on Shawna's laptop, I decided to load Ubuntu on the 'copter to see if we liked it. I have to say this was one of the most pleasant experiences with an operating system I have ever had. I'm tempted to say that I like the new Ubuntu better than OSX. I'm not 100% behind this yet, but I have already gotten all the standard Windows fonts work, and the OS comes with Firefox and OpenOffice installed by default (no fighting with an installation tool (of course even that wouldn't be a problem as both the basic install tool and the power app are both unbelievably powerful)). Within minutes of installing the system (which took about 15 minutes), I was browsing the Internet, editing documents, and, most importantly, configuring my LAMP stack.

 

All told, Ubuntu is great. It's at least as user-friendly as OSX (which is saying something given the cost). In many ways, I like it a little better. The installation and management of software is actually easier than the haphazard ways of package management of OSX. While it doesn't have as much eye-candy, I think it might actually be the stronger OS.

 

It's really nice to see what a mature Linux distribution is actually capable of. I remember installing Redhat 4 back in the day and having to navigate a command line driven disk partitioning tool. Ubuntu's installation tool is a breeze and the ability to use all of the great Debian packages (without having to install Debian (something I was never actually able to do)).

 

Ah well. I'm starting to think about trying to install this on my Powerbook.


 

10.16.2007 10:04am

 

In case you haven't read yesterday's entry yet, this is part 2, so you should read the 15th's post first.

 

I'm still really mad about this whole Radiohead thing. I can't really figure out entirely why, but part of the issue, for me, has to be how big a part of my life Kid A has been. When I was the weird kid who listened to sixties pop records and 80s electro and German music no one had heard of as a freshman in my dorm at Georgia Tech, Kid A came out and really connected. As I said in the last post, I was impressed by how they were able to take the music I liked and make something that the idiots on my hall were listening to. It was validating in a way (as though I was secretly "right" all along). In Rainbows seems like a betrayal. If, all along, everyone just wanted more guitars! and pretty songs about flowers! (I'm being hyperbolic here), it also seems that Radiohead kind of did, too: as though all their experimentation was an exhaustive strain that they are just as tired of as their many fans. So, in a way, I want to go back and tell the younger me, writing a glowing essay on I Might Be Wrong for the Tech lit review that he is being lied to, but I'm not sure that would have been any better. It's like, in a weird way, finding out that Santa Claus isn't real: while it sucks, I'd have much rather believed for a little while that I was right than known all along that it was just a sham.

 

Speaking of shams, this online distribution thing that Radiohead is doing is a crock of shit.

 

So, when the album was announced, Radiohead offered a "pay what you want" digital download and an $80 "discbox" that featured:

 

  1. 2 12" Vinyl Records
  2. 2 CDs
  3. A hardback book
  4. A "fancy" box

 

There was no mention of a regular CD release. Not being willing to pay for MP3s, I decided that what I wanted to pay was, in fact, 0 cents. I've heard that some people had their credit cards billed a "processing fee"/asshole-tax even if they paid nothing, but I wasn't asked for credit card info, so I actually got these MP3s for nothing.

 

As there was no mention of a regular CD release, most Radiohead fans (who, I suppose, are more ethical (or more used to paying for culture) than I) actually volunteered to give CD-type-money for these MP3s. Very noble, but the joke's on them. It turns out that after you already paid/not-paid for the MP3s, you found out that they were 160kbps MP3s (apparently encoded with Xing). If I may (and I can since this is my blog, after all), I'd like to take a digression as equally nerdy as the krautrock digression in Part 1 of this series: I know a lot about MP3 encoding. Explaining how I know all of this would take too much time, but suffice it to say that the minute I saw that email (about the 160kbps), I was really glad I didn't pay for those files.

 

In case you don't know, MP3s are encoded at a bitrate, which basically means that for every second of music you have X kilobytes of data, where X is the bitrate. Obviously (or maybe not), the higher the bitrate, the better quality the MP3. While MP3 will encode as low as 32kbps (usually used for web streaming and mobile phone ringers), 128kbps is usually the baseline for "CD quality" (assuming you are underwater, listening to speakers that only partially work, and are listening from a CD that is horribly damaged), the standard recommended by über-nerdy Hydrogen Audio is now the LAME preset -V 2 --vbr-new (it used to be good old --alt-preset standard, but I digress) running from LAME version 3.97. This standard is what is called a variable bit rate (VBR) encoding standard, as the bitrate changes as needed: more for complicated passages, less for uncomplicated moments. With -V 2, you are usually getting around 190kbps, although if you encoded pure white noise (as a friend of mine and I once did), you would get closer to the max (320kbps) because of the difficulty of compressing white noise. The point is, though, that -V 2 --vbr-new is a transparent encoding, meaning that in an ABX test most users can't distinguish between the CD and the MP3. 160kbps MP3s are significantly below this quality threshold. While not as much an insult as 128, these files are very low quality (and it shows when you listen to the album (although, as some have pointed out, the album seems to have been recorded and mixed by deaf monkeys in a basement using tin-foil speakers, so it might not all be the MP3s' fault)).

 

More to the point, though, is why this is such crap. The whole point that most of the music press has glommed on to is that Radiohead is doing this to try and recoup some cash from the inevitable pre-release leak that occurs with major albums of this caliber (I definitely heard Kid A long before it was available in stores (I still had to go to four record stores before I could find a copy the day it came out, though)). That's noble and such, but here's the rub: as much as Hydrogen Audio cares about MP3 encoder settings, The Scene is equally concerned with quality. That's why most early leaked albums are such good quality (except when the leak comes from a music journalist or something (in which case it was encoded in iTunes at the default setting (idiots))). "Okay, so what?" you ask. Well, I'll tell you: if this album had been legitimately released by a major label, we would be all listening to a -V 2 --vbr-new encoding done in LAME 3.97 that wouldn't have distortion on the cymbals of Phil Selway's drums and a horrible muddying of all the other instruments and we wouldn't have been guilted into paying for them.

 

Again, so what? The problem with this whole scenario is that Radiohead never made mention of the third option, the inevitable CD release that will be coming early next year. So, most fans are presented with the option of buying MP3s of the album or paying through the nose for a fetish object. Again, this wouldn't be such a mean spirited gesture if the MP3s weren't such horrible quality (I feel like, really, this whole gesture is a way to get back at the world for the really, really bad quality pre-mastered leak of Hail to the Thief (except, like the RIAA suing its customers, it's just an infantile revenge made by a toddler whose world is ending)). Basically, you have people expecting the MP3s to be the only affordable option and paying accordingly to be told that, in fact, the joke's on them. The whole thing is mean-spiritedness masking as a political gesture. Frankly, I'm not buying it (and I won't be buying the CD (and I will be downloading FLAC rips of the "discbox" when it arrives on these shores)). If you wanted to truly give your music away, you could at least do it at reasonable quality, rather than flooding the market with a cheap imitation and making people pay for it.

 

Jerks.


 

10.15.2007 11:12am

Are we now to praise Radiohead for failing to innovate? That seems to be Mark Pytlik's claim in his review of the album for indie-taste-setter website Pitchfork Media. With choice digs like "Radiohead's sudden willingness to embrace their capacity for uncomplicated beauty might be In Rainbows' most distinguishing quality, and one of the primary reasons it's an improvement on Hail to the Thief" or "Although 2003's Hail to the Thief was overlong and scattershot, it was important insofar as it represented the full band's full-circle digestion and synthesis of the sounds and methods they first toyed with on OK Computer." Most indie critics spent the first half of this century tripping over themselves to praise Radiohead's continual ability to test the limits of rock and pop music on a major label in an era of retrenching around the hit single and lawsuits against fans. Now, though, when Radiohead releases an album that is pedestrian at best (I believe the first words out of my mouth were "this is unlistenable"), we are glad that they are back to being "a full band again," eliminating the "electronic material [Thom Yorke] used to shoehorn onto Radiohead albums." So, basically, what most of the people (Ptylik included) who seem to like the album suggest is that, secretly, they've always wanted Radiohead to re-record The Bends.

 

Don't get me wrong, The Bends is a great album. I think it's arguably the greatest achievement of the pressure cooker that was mid-90s Britain. That said, I've always maintained that OK Computer was over-rated and that Kid A is one of the best pop records to be released on a major label, ever. I like all the "electronic material he used to shoehorn onto Radiohead albums" because, frankly, why do we need another band playing guitar solos? If I wanted lots of guitar, I would (and do) listen to Led Zeppelin records or The Quicksilver Messenger Service (or even Ash Ra Tempel). I was so much a Radiohead fan this century because of their electronic material and their conversion of Cluster's electro experiments in the 70s into pop music gold.

 

While it could be argued that I'm just a bitter Radiohead fan (and I probably am), I think the problem I have is that the new album's return to guitar solos! and melody! and it's amnesia about the last decade of the band's career is being praised by many of their fans as a return to a form they jettisoned ten years ago. It seems hypocritical, if most Radiohead fans were waiting for The Return of the Bends, to praise the band's pop music experiments on Kid A, Amnesiac, and Hail to the Thief as innovative and ground-breaking if, after all, people secretly wanted more of "Black Star" or "Fake Plastic Trees" all along.

 

Ultimately, I find myself back in the position I was in when, in junior high, I bought a copy of OK Computer and was puzzled when I got it out of the shrink wrap. "What's the deal with this record?" I asked. "Why do people care? This is boring." When Kid A came out, though, I got it (despite how much the band was "borrowing" from a lot of Germans and Brits no one really listens to anymore).

 

So maybe I'm a bitter fan, but the point here is that I got on board this train because of the things that most of the hypocritical music press praised as being innovative and genius. Now that we are expected to be grateful for guitar solos!, I'm just back to being bored.

 

Tune-in tomorrow and I'll tell you why Radiohead's "innovative" distribution model is a sham and a chance to bilk their fans even worse than having the RIAA sue them.


 

10.11.2007 2:51pm

I'm reading Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature by Deleuze-&-Guattari for class and, so, thinking a lot about "In the Penal Colony" and other works of Kafka's. Sitting here, talking to David, I started thinking about the prospect of having the machine from Kafka's Penal Colony hooked up to the Internet, in much the same way that this gentleman has connected a rifle to a webcam for the purposes of deer killing. Think about the implications of being able to inscribe whatever message you want into the flesh of a screaming prisoner! Ask your girlfriend to marry you! Support your local sporting concern! Highlight your business in a catchy and innovative way!

 

I think we all know this is the one, true usage of the Internet. The reason we all log on.

 

But seriously, I really feel like (and I've been making this argument for a while in English 15) that if we all stopped lying about our more violent impulses, the world would be a better place. Imagine: The culture industry could finally confirm Adorno; The president could finally admit that he just don't like Muslims; McDonalds could declare that they are--in fact--trying to fatten us up for the coming of our alien overlords. The world would, I think, be a better place if we all just said what sort of hate-filled, rage-addicted, sour creatures we all were. While this may not seem like a Utopia, I would assert (in a truly dialectic move) that it is fundamentally a Utopian desire: through the honest exchange of brutalist philosophy, the possibility of resistence would be increased. If companies just came out and said: "You know what, fuck the environment. In fact, fuck all of you people, too. We like dumping radioactive waste in your drinking water and we've gotten off on it for years," we could stop trying to find The Truth and start getting work done. Am I wrong? Tell me I'm wrong.


 

10.01.2007 11:07am

I will try to keep the profanity to a minimum. In fact, I'll give you an executive summary, as well: don't buy an iPhone.

 

The new version of the iPhone software, 1.1.1, was released over the weekend. In addition to fixing seven security vulnerabilities, it erased the entire contents of my iPhone, deleted my custom ringtone ("St. Elmo's Fire" by Brian Eno), and erased all of the games and utilities I'd installed.

 

Apparently, rather than continuing to allow people to release amazingly useful applications for the iPhone, Apple decided to lock out 3rd party application developers, effectively closing down the ability to do things like: play Yahtzee!, chat on IM or IRC, use SSH, or upload photos to Flickr. This has nothing to do with unlocking your SIM card to use the iPhone on another carrier. Now I've lost all my photos, and I'm having to spend over an hour with this ... thing ... tethered to my computer like some horrible parasite because I've got to shoot eight gigs of MP3s back on it.

 

What bothers me, though, is that Apple has made it very clear that they are going to continue to treat their customers as merely revenue streams, rather than the creative minds their ads always exhort us to be. Instead of having a cool phone that could be made to do a lot of other cool things, I am solely to use my phone as a means of buying things from their cronies and thugs. I refuse to pay 99cents for a ringtone, especially with the case of the Eno song I was using when I've already bought the CD it comes from twice. It seems like the most limited of corporate strategies to focus on short-term optimization of revenue streams at the expense of producing a long-term and sustainable community of happy end-users.

 

Except for the free ringtones, these applications were actually making the iPhone more productive, rather than less. I don't understand the corporate mindset that would justify preventing end-users from improving on an already great project.

 

Ah well. I'm stuck with an iPhone so that hopefully you won't be.

 

EDIT: I'm not the only one angry about this, btw.


 

9.28.2007 11:35am

As you may or may not have gathered from previous posts, I watch a lot of football. I think I like football because it isn't literature (in that it's complicated but not something I could care to interpret). Reading ESPN's college football coverage this morning, I read two articles (about the two major Big East powers) this morning. The first article was about WVU's Noel Devine's becoming-human following a high school career that featured numerous "incidents" and his fathering two children by two different women. At WVU, thanks to Rich Rodriguez's ($1 million salary) brand of "tough love" and the family-like atmosphere of the student-faculty continuum, Noel Devine is finally learning to be a man and not some sort of evil child. Great, fine, whatever. Football is littered with stories about really horrible individuals either overcoming or not through sport. Then I read this other article about Rutgers. William C. Dowling, professor of 18th Century Literature (and owner of a pretty cool homepage (despite the use of Comic Sans MS)), has been accused of racism for claiming that the school should be giving scholarships to a student interested in learning rather than to a "functional illiterate who can't read a cereal box." Harsh words indeed, but after reading Dowling's whole page, he has a point. I've been hearing, for years, about troubles at Rutgers (decaying facilities, administrative clashes, what-have-you) and it really forces you to focus on the unprecedented athletic buildup that has simultaneously been occurring. It really begs the question: what really is the point of college athletics?

 

A few years ago, my dad mentioned how he hated having to travel all over the country with the at-the-time-independent Air Force Academy Falcons as they played teams throughout the nation to build awareness of the Academy. I suppose that's all well-and-good when going to college nets you a few years of getting shot at after graduation, but, in general, this argument is the reason for college football: it increase exposure of our academic brand. Fine, that's really great: many more people are aware of (and buying the logo of) Boise State University after watching the Broncos manhandle the Oklahoma Sooners (the same Sooners of whom one OU chancellor once said that he hoped to build a university that the football team could be proud of) in the Fiesta Bowl last year. Now everyone knows about Boise State, but the question that really must be asked: if your university is truly a place of learning (I would dispute this claim, but I digress) do you really want to attract the sorts of students who make decisions about their academic futures based on the outcome of a sporting event? Does the ability to successfully run the option really have anything to do with the ability to successfully teach a student anything?

 

While things are clearly bad at Rutgers, here at Penn State, we have successfully integrated learning and playing, right? I would say that the athletic department and it's weekly hooliganism doesn't really impact my life, but, then again, I (and most of the people I know) have non-working computers in our offices (which have poor ventilation and are unusable if the temperature outside rises above 85). Half the time, when I'm teaching, I can't get a working computer in my classroom and have to lecture from my private laptop. I've had to buy dry erase markers because there weren't any in my classroom. I once lectured in a room that had fewer seats than students. Even thinking back to my time at Georgia Tech, I could make the same claims and that's a school whose student body really doesn't care about athletics. Here's the question, though: are these the fault of college athletics or are college athletics and the regrettable classroom conditions we often face both merely symptoms of the general devaluation of education in America?

 

I'm thinking that this weekend (when a number of my students will be missing class to go to the Illinois game), I'm going to read Samuel Delany's Tales of Nevèrÿon because I've never read it and I've been meaning to for over a year. While my rebellion isn't going to do anything to change college athletics, I'm interested to see what would happen if I were to devote my full attention to my work and try to learn something new that doesn't involve passing, catching, kicking, blitzing, or running.


 

 

9.19.2007 2:37pm

Responding to Nugan's post about my post about Blackwater and Britney Spears. I wasn't being as clear as I could have been and I apologize for that. I wasn't trying to deny that Bush's whole operation has done serious damage to America and that the bleeding from this will go on for several decades to come. What, instead, I was trying to point was that a certain cultural logic that authorized both Bush's military adventures abroad and Britney Spears spectacle of consumption is fading. That's what I find more exciting.

 

The point I was trying to get at, with the whole observation, is that there seems to be something deeper driving our national fadish behavior (for lack of a more accurate term). While bubblegum pop and right-wing politics may seem divergent social formations, the underlying socio-cultural formations that authorize them may not be as different. In both cases, we find a certain excessive display of, well, excess itself that could be articulated as a response to the national trauma of 9/11. The question, then, that interests me, now, is whether or not these cultural logics that rise and fall are, in fact, themselves fads.


 

9.18.2007 11:10am

Tuesday is my day off. I don't have anything until a 6:30 seminar, which means I'm at home listening to Pelican albums and reading A Scanner Darkly, hence the multiple blog posts.

 

I just read on Pitchfork that Rhino Records will be reissuing all of Joy Division's albums in 2 disc sets. Sigh. I've come to the conclusion that deluxe reissues are a way of punishing long time fans. However, I'm also starting to think that they are a losing battle, as well. Allow me to explain: I currently own three copies of Unknown Pleasures (on CD, on Vinyl, and as part of the Heart and Soul boxed set). I am not paying for this album again. Consequently, I will be downloading the second disc of "previously unreleased live material" when it hits the Internets. The same thing happened with Rhino's Television reissues. I already own both albums, why would I buy them again? Consequently, a buddy of mine made me some FLAC rips of the bonus CDs and they got archived to DVD-R. That said, I did pay for a second copy of Another Green World because the remastered sound was night-and-day different. Overall, though, why should I buy something I've already bought just because it's new and (slightly) improved. This planned obsolescence of classic albums isn't going to work as it does in the automobile industry because I can go to the Internet and get (for free) a new version of an album, while getting a car downloaded to my home is still a dicey proposition.


 

9.18.2007 10:03am

I was really glad to hear the news about Blackwater yesterday. First off, we were briefly excited because Shawna's brother is a Blackwater employee (who turns out to be in Afghanistan and, therefore, unaffected by the ordering out (sadly)), but, more importantly, there have been several symptoms in the last few weeks that the country seems to be waking up from it's six-year-long nightmare.

 

There's a moment in William Gibson's newest, Spook Country (which is so good its scary; I can't recommend it enough (or stop talking about it, it would seem)), where one of the main characters describes the current administration (and associated cronies, thugs, and hangers-on) by saying: "Things are winding down, for these people." That sentence, more than any other, has really had me thinking recently. In a lot of ways, the last month or so has seen a lot of symptoms of the collapse of a whole cultural logic that has permeated our society in the last six years. These symptoms, to me, suggest the importance of thinking in terms of the dialectic and the power of social forces to continue in flux.

 

Blackwater, more than a lot of other things, has been a great cause for concern. A private army, ideologically pure and devout, is one of the major factors in the rise of dictatorships (one needs only think of Il Duce's Black Shirts or the Schutzstaffel in Germany) and, largely, Blackwater was a private army for the Christian Right (it still is, of course). More than their crusading around in the Middle East, though, I was troubled by the government's deployment of these thugs to New Orleans after Katrina to restore order without having to declare martial law. In effect, in New Orleans, there was a private army running around that had the authority to enforce the law without answering to the public (so, basically they were a more heavily armed version of the police, but I digress).

 

With this removal from Iraq, it seems like this whole thing is starting to wind down. The Iraqi government (and good for them) is starting to stand up and realize that having armed thugs running around shooting civilians (esp. armed thugs provided by a paramilitary fundamentalist Christian organization that view themselves as being on a Crusade). This seems to mirror rumblings that are starting to happen at home, as well: a realization that maybe this whole apparatus is making all of us less safe than more safe.

 

Along similar lines, though, I want to talk about Britney Spears (I bet you didn't see that coming). Her bloated, inebriated, and (frankly) disturbing VMA performance, along with a lot of the backlash against Lindsey Lohan and Nicole Richie (more acknowledging that they aren't "little girls lost" but are, in fact, cokehead idiots) seems to suggest that we may be, again, waking up from this whole Stupid Spoiled Whore Video Playlist cultural logic that has sufficed American culture.

 

While I admit that I did get rather nervous about the coming destruction of American culture at the hands of militarism and, for lack of a better term, whorism ("excess" might also work) , it seems important to always keep in mind the fact that Americans, as a biomass, are not idiots (or maybe are so stupid that they get bored easily) and that things tend to work themselves out, as long as concerned individuals keep working. It's important, at times like these, to remember Jameson's claim that capitalism is both the best and the worst thing to ever happen to humanity. Nonetheless, I couldn't possibly tell you what's coming down the pipe for our culture, but it seems reassuring that some of the more troubling aspects of our recent culture are starting to reverse.


 

9.10.2007 9:08pm

I saw this ad on Monday Night Football:

 

 

First off, it's directed by Michael Mann and features music from The Last of the Mohicans. Blah blah blah.

 

The point that bothers me about this ad is multifaceted but pivots on a simple point. During at least three points in the ad, the Reebok logo on Shawn Merriman's jersey is clearly visible (you can also see it on Steven Jackson's jersey at the beginning of his run). No big deal. Watching the rather epic treatment of football, I thought: "whoa, this is a really cool Reebok ad." Except it's a Nike ad. About leaving nothing. Including, apparently, one's product.

 

Now that I have cable again, I've been watching a lot of (football on) television and I've figured something out about advertising: the best ads are short films that have little to do with the product being sold. Even Apple's hyperminimal advertisements have little to do with the product as a whole: they merely feature a feature.

 

Following the epic piece of short film that was the Nike clip, one of the dread smorgasbord of local ads came on. I can't remember which one of these steaming piles was actually featured, but I think it may have been for Highmark Blue Shield. Nonetheless, the local advertisements I've been watching feature jingles (god, the jingles), products, and messages. The Highmark Blue Shield tells me that I should eat more fruits and vegetables so that my kids won't be obese (or something). I hate those ads (especially the ones with jingles).

 

I'm wondering, now, if the secret to advertising is to tell your viewers absolutely nothing about your product. In fact, maybe you should actually feature your opponents product. Although, that might not even be true: what you might end up with are those (expletive) Warren Wallace ads.

 

God I hate TV, sometimes.


 

9.10.2007 3:04pm

I'm on a forced Philip K. Dick kick at the moment, thanks to Paul Youngquist's seminar, "Science Fiction and Cyberculture." I just finished The Man in the High Castle and am reading The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch at the moment. The point of this post, though, was reading through The Man in the High Castle for the second time. For Paul's class this week, we are reading two books, the Dick novel and Starship Troopers, that were memorable parts of my high school reading experience, for good and bad.

 

I read Starship Troopers as part of my initial discovery of Heinlein when I was in tenth grade (funny side note: we had to write a 20 page research paper on a major work of American literature. My teacher vetoed Stranger in a Strange Land because she didn't want me working on Scientology). Anyway, I totally loved the book. It was an interesting story of a young man trying to find his way in a crazy world. In a lot of ways, it was my Catcher in the Rye (which I hated).

 

Later, as a senior, I stumbled on The Man in the High Castle in our high school library because it had a pretty cover. I decided to read it and was transfixed, until the highly enigmatic and confusing conclusion (to my pre-postmodern mind). Suffice to say that I felt cheated and hated the book.

 

This week, I reread both works (two books, I must say, that had as much impact on my as anything I've read, except Neuromancer). The reversal was shocking. Heinlein's novel was poorly paced; the characters were flat cardboard; the novel was an apology for fascism (which didn't offend me, but I never noticed it the the first time). At the same time, Dick's prose was enigmatic, mysterious and his sense of the divine and the profound was shocking. His treatment of the objects that surround us fascinated me. I loved the novel.

 

While I realize this is very clear evidence for me having grown up, I still found it shocking. The reversal from Dick to Heinlein in terms of enjoyment was striking.


 

9.7.2007 2:43pm

For those of you who were worried, I have a new stove. We came home from Zeno's (post-D&G drinking) and there was a brand new Whirlpool (they make ovens, apparently) Stove waiting for us. It feels very cheaply made, but it has four working burners and doesn't shoot sparks when we turn it on.

 

Anyway, enough of that. The exciting news is that I have an iPhone. I can't turn it on and play with it, yet, though. It turns out you have to activate it using your home computer which is, naturally, at home. Instead, I'm stuck overseeing a rough draft review session in my 202C section. While my teacherly conscience says "you need to let them stay and learn," the new iPhone in my backpack is screaming about accessing the Internet on my cellphone and scrolling using my fingertip. Ah, life.

 

I think there was something else going on, but iPhoneiPhoneiPhone.


 

9.5.2007 2:53pm

This was on the BBC News Wire today. Apparently, the British are going to be creating human-animal hybrids for the purpose of extracting stem cells. My favorite remark from the article was "an HFEA consultation showed the public were 'at ease' with the idea when told it could pave the way for therapies for conditions such as Alzheimer's disease," belying fears that the general public would find human-animal hybrids repellent.

 

Every time I hear something about human-animal hybrids, I think back to George W. Bush's State of the Union address from January, 2006: "Tonight I ask you to pass legislation to prohibit the most egregious abuses of medical research: human cloning in all its forms, creating or implanting embryos for experiments, creating human-animal hybrids, and buying, selling, or patenting human embryos." At the time, I thought he was high or reading too much Paul Difillipo, but, now, maybe he was on to something, after all.

 

I, for one, am glad that we live in a country that places a higher premium on a morality defined several thousand years ago than being on the forefront of emerging technologies. That said, I imagine that our morality will be very useful when humanzee shocktroops come for us all in the night.

 

Additionally, I find it odd that, more and more, it seems that science keeps lapping science fiction. Where something once seemed far off (the idea of having half wolverine house servants), now they are happening in the UK. Oh well, I for one welcome the coming of manbearpig.


 

9.5.2007 10:55am

We are, at the moment, a household in crisis. While it might not seem like a big deal, the loss of our oven last night has been a traumatic blow. As I'm leaving seminar last night around 9:30, I call Shawna to see how the sausage and onion pizza she was making was turning out. "We have a problem with dinner," she says. It turns out that while frying the sausage, sparks started shooting out of the oven and now it doesn't work. We ended up eating Campbell's Chunky Soup on Potato Buds, which isn't as bad as it sounds. The big problem will arrive in the coming days. While I would like to think that we live in a perfect world, I know that the people who own our house aren't the most responsive or intelligent, so I don't think we'll be getting a new oven by, say, tonight. Which, of course, means that my marshmallow-making experiments are getting shelved, Shawna's weekly cake making is out of the question, I can't make the wild salmon and slow-roasted tomato we were having for dinner tonight, but, more importantly, we suddenly, amidst a house full of food, have nothing to eat.

 

Two or three weeks ago, in Giant, we noticed that we actually skipped from the produce section to the spaghetti sauce row without needing to buy any processed food. Our cart was full of some organic spices, vegetables, meat, and some milk. This fed us for a week or so. We were really proud of ourselves that we didn't need to support the ecologically unfriendly processed food industry. Now our environmentalism is coming back to haunt us: we have no food that we can cook in a microwave.

 

I've run into this problem in the past. There's a scene in Fight Club were the narrator remarks "A house full of condiments and no food, how embarrassing," and I've often felt similarly: "A house full of ingredients and no food," when I've come home late and needed something to eat at the moment, but nothing like this. Having no oven is like trying to live without the Internet: I find myself getting ready to scramble some eggs for breakfast and remember that I can't actually do that anymore.

 

I suppose I could turn this into an commentary about our silly dependence on technology, but that's such a tired argument. Moreover, it doesn't get me any closer to eating. At least in the old house where I was living, I actually had a fireplace I could have cooked in. Here, short of our electric range, we have nothing to cook with or in. So, I don't know what to do. I've gotten used to cooking dinner every night and being able to make molten sugar syrup whenever I need it. I don't really want to eat frozen food for a week or two. I can't afford to eat out every night (in terms of calories and dollars). I'm thinking about buying one of these, but I have a feeling that will only get me part of the way.


 

9.2.2007 12:16pm

Sometimes when you ask the Internet a question, the universe answers. As if responding to my previous post, Appalachain State University (a I-AA sacrificial lamb) beat #5 ranked Michigan in front of a sell-out crowd at The Big House. As someone who has had a perpetual bloodlust for the maize and blue long before attending a Big Ten school, I was very happy. Enough about football, though.

 

There was a really interesting post on BoingBoing about conspiracy theories that center around Denver International Airport. An interesting read, to say the least. Apparently, DIA is an intersection "not only with UFO and 2012 'millennialist' contingents, but also the conspiracy branches concerned with underground military bases and reptilian aliens. Left-wing radicals, fundamentalist Christians, UFO hunters, white nationalists, hippie mystics, Vietnam veterans and anti-U.N. Libertarians are all able to pick out evidence within the main body of DIA infatuation to support their competing perspectives." I find it really strange that each of these groups has a unique interpretation of the symbology of an airport. Are our lives that starved of meaning that we begin to look to the messianic iconography of the most mundane of public spaces?

 

As a conspiracy enthusiast, I have to say that the DIA theorists really reveal some of the sillier aspects of conspiracy theorists. Although, in thinking about this stuff, I find myself saying things like "people who believe in lizard men are silly" but still defending the possibility of Quetzlcoatl's return on December 21, 2012. Then I feel sort of silly. Why a feathered serpent but not a master-race of lizards (and, frankly, why lizard men in the first place (and are these supposed to be the same lizards as the ones who showed up at Montauk?)). Anyway, I've been thinking more about conspiracy theories, after re-watching Mystery of the Urinal Deuce, in which we learn that all 9-11 conspiracy theories are a government conspiracy to make the government seem omnipotent.

 

It seems like this is a more valid explanation. I've always liked the explanation of conspiracies as a postmodern mythology, a way of providing a systemic meaning for a chaotic world, but I've always thought that maybe we would come up with something a little more plausible or reassuring than lizard people. I'm wondering, now, if South Park's explanation might be a little closer to reality. I'm specifically thinking about how the Air Force seems to come out with a new explanation of The Roswell UFO Crashes every few years for no reason other than, it seems, to stir up new interests in a cover-up. While this seems as nefarious as lizard men running the world, it sure seems a lot more plausible.


 

8.31.2007 1:52pm

I missed the first day of college football last night due to seminars and post-seminar revelry, but I feel like I didn't miss much. It seems to me that LSU beating Mississippi State or Louisville beating Weber State (or was it Murray State?) shouldn't surprise anyone. It's always bothered me, though, that football only lasts for a short amount of time but, given that, the first week isn't even really worth watching. I mean, Penn State is playing Florida International who haven't won more than a game or three in the last decade, and yet town is still as crazy as it ever is. I guess I can understand getting worked up over a big rivalry game, but these powder-puff openers just seem like a waste of time and money. I mean if someone gets hurt during a game against a team like a Youngstown State or a Buffalo, they're still just as hurt, right?

 

h4cks! - David

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