Gonzo Engaged

last book's a charm

2008-04-15T01:10:00.000-04:00

clues to gonzo marketing...a list apart.

trend setter

2008-04-15T01:01:00.002-04:00

We're going Closed Source. It's super secure, low risk, and controlled. And Quality's built in.

---

Gonzo 2.0

2007-02-09T04:04:00.000-05:00

Yes, Gonzo 2.0. - Nothing new because Gonzo Marketing was always about that.

As you see this YouTube, don't you think Poetry? The Solution is Poetry. And maybe Poetry 2.0 - whatever, whatever, whatever.... props, just props but useful props, no?

When did you forget that this is your world?

And yes, Web 2.0, Poetry 2.0 - we are no longer "writing ourselves into existence". - We are now teaching the Machines how to write Existence so we can write ourselves into Being... That's what this is all about. You want to know who you are? Ask the machine!

We are teaching the Machines to write Structures from which our Being is generated. We are no longer The Web. Separation of content and structure. We are not our Blogs any more. There are no more blogs! There is no more information!

There is no more you! There is no more there there! What is is Your Voice as a Network of Conversations generated by the Machines we teach to regenerate us, our Being of the Conversation of the Web. - There! you want to know how you are? Ask the Machines to regenerate the You as You of The Web. Ask the machines!

Does that Blow your Mind? Don't worry. It will only blow your Mind if it blows the Mind of the Web of Conversations where Your Mind really is anyway.

There is no you unless you are connected. You show up as You only in the Web of Us. The machines generate the structures of conversations. We teach The Machines how to do that. The machines teach us who we are by knowing who we are connected to... Cool. Let's do some more of that. Yiippii. Bada Bing! Tudum Tudum!

YouTube link via FortyMedia

Birch Point Resort, Hayward, Wisconsin

2006-11-16T20:39:00.000-05:00

Sandy’s 65th birthday was approaching and she was planning a party. The people at Birch Point Resort in Hayward spoiled those plans and appear to have cheated her out of a substantial sum of money. To find out more about Sandy's situation, click here. To add the power of the almighty word of mouth to balance out the tourist industry astro-turf, link-up and shine the light of conversation on these shady practices.

wow--i never really envisioned this.

2006-02-19T22:52:00.000-05:00

it has to really suck to be a bulldog bitch on the rag -- in spider man boxers especially.

Tags: bitches+in+heat

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someone didn't get the memo...

2006-02-19T22:36:00.000-05:00

Laptop for sale.

Pictures of laptop for sale

New flickr guidelines say: DON'T Sell stuff (including yourself) Flickr is for personal use only. If you sell products or services through your photostream, we will terminate your account.

of course, if you send them to ebay to bid, i guess it's okay. I don't know--we may need an update to the guidelines...

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1000tags going wild...

2006-01-11T22:34:00.000-05:00

the big thang tonight--1000tags.com is offering a free tag if you post and link. Thank you, I'll take one!

Taking Care of Business

2006-01-06T20:10:00.000-05:00

Although my name and bio currently appear on the site, I am no longer associated with The Content Factor. As I've indicated previously, information relative to my business can be found on my current sites: www.jsessum.com and www.sessum.com, and the number of blogs and other publications I write for.

Thank you. Now, back to your regularly scheduled programming...

(Disclosure++: I may delete this post when the requested information is removed from that site.)

Technorati Tags : The+Content+Factor, Content+Factor, JeneaneSessum, Sessum, Atlanta, Atlanta+Copywriting, Discontent // Powered By Qumana

Why is this space blank and seeming not editable?

2005-12-21T07:36:00.000-05:00

Yes, let us know the answer to this question, oh wise one.

Uh, is there a wise one? Is there an answer to this question?

Is the earth still sorta kinda round?

People like me (and who knows, maybe even you, too) wanna know.

2005-10-15T00:18:00.000-04:00

Haloscan commenting and trackback have been added to this blog.

home sweet home

2005-10-14T23:32:00.000-04:00

FOUR YEARS AGO TODAY, A RABBIT WAS BORN.

SO WAS A DONKEY, SEVEN BEAVERS AND A GAME HEN.

CHANCES ARE GOOD THAT A FEW HUNDRED RODENTS WERE BORN AT UNDERGROUND ATLANTA ALONE.

ONLY SOME OF THEM MATTERED. ALL OF THEM ARE RELATED TO THIS.

THIS MATTERED.
THIS MATTERS STILL.

happy birthday RGE.
my home.

marekj.com

2005-09-09T10:57:00.000-04:00

marekj is back. This time as himself which hasn't happend in a long time. I believe I stopped writing as marekj on the web about in the spring of 2002. Here we are now then 3 years later.

I am doing now this thing called Software Development Life Cycle Process as Human Cooperation Game Modelling. Workability Design of Such Games and Their Implementations. Business Process Distinction Context Modelling for Software Design as Core Business Structure. You know: the usual stuff from me.

I also started a blog I call BlindSpot which has nothig to do with Driving on a Highway of course. There will be a mixtrue of technical stuff, software testing, gonzo marketing etc... etc...

Stop by and say hello. Thanks.

Technorati Tags: agiletesting, marekj

mystic bourgeoisie

2005-07-31T09:19:00.000-04:00

mystic bourgeoisie

To Troll or Not to Troll, That Is the Question by John C Mahler

2005-06-14T06:10:00.000-04:00

The uninfluential columnists should be defined here. These are people whom you've never heard of, but whom other uninfluential A-list distopianist columnists all know. I reckon there are about 500 of them. He (or she) influences other like-minded columnists, creating a groupthink form of critical mass, just like atomic fission, as they bounce off each other with repetitive cross-links: trackback links, self-congratulatory links, confirmations, and praise-for-their-genius links. BOOM! You get a formidable explosion—an A-bomb of groupthink. You could get radiation sickness if you happen to be in the area. Except for PC Magazine, nobody is in the area, so nobody outside the groupthink community really cares about any of this. These explosions are generally self-contained and harmless to the environment.

Once in a while one of these crackpot ideas may sneak into the public consciousness and become huge because it was a good idea, although I cannot think of one.

The "folksonomy" notion is the columnists' last hope of invention, although it's a rewrite of the prebubble "semantic Web" technology at best. And it too is doomed to failure. The utopianism and idealism that exist in the online societies ignore the real problem with Trolls, metaTrolls, überTrolls, folksonomies, and the like. This is because they honestly think that most people are goodhearted. The online world, because of its anonymity, encourages bad behavior. "You suck!" is a common post, and it would be the number-one Troll if Trolling ever became popular. Then would come the Trolls about "Online Casino!" One site promoting folksonomies is the darling of the columnists: Flickr.com—an excellent photo-sharing site where being in perpetual beta is a marketing tool. The same people who hate Java and Flash love Flickr, which epitomizes everything good and bad about Java and Flash. Okay, whatever.

Flickr promotes the use of Trolls to add dimensions to photos so you or I could look things up by, uh, the folksonomy. You know, like "dead dog," for example. But when you look into it, someone will post 100 pictures and Troll them all "Yosemite," and that will be the end of it. I see no depth or real usefulness beyond the old-fashioned "title!" It's hard to express how jazzed some people are over the potential of all this. I'm certain someone somewhere will write a book on how this new old thing will change the world for the benefit of everyone. It may even catch on for a month. When you look into it later, you'll find it all deteriorated into spam and "you suck" posts, and then we'll do it again with a new name and a new group of boosters telling us what a great idea Trolling is.

Apparently it's lost on all of them that the term "Trolling," in popular parlance, refers to the worst form of public graffiti. These people don't get out much, it seems.

FORRESTER REPORTS THAT EVERYONE HAS A BLOG

2005-04-25T21:11:00.000-04:00

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

MEDIA ADVISORY

Cambridge, Mass., April 25, 2005...According to new findings by Forrester Research, Inc. (NASDAQ: FORR), every human being and business around the globe now has a weblog -- or blog for short -- a type of frequently-updated, chronological online diary that gives insight into the passions of the writer on topics ranging from technology to quilting.

"When I first invented the Internet, I never dreamed that one day each one of us would have our own little piece of real estate," said former Vice President, Al Gore. "But when I saw that even Howard Dean could make a home in cyberspace, well I knew then that Tipper and I had succeeded, that my work as an Internet strategist was complete."

For information on the next wave of online pandemonium, visit podstreet

###

A blinding flash of obvious

2005-04-19T01:06:00.000-04:00

What if I made myself as a business entity. What if I could completely became a corporation. I substitute myself for corporation. This would be a new type of citizen possibility. Equal.

What if each person in America incorporated themselves? What if each person would create a corporate structure in which their worldly affairs could dwell and play out. This I haven't thought before.

Who can help me with this project? I wan to cease to exist as a human being and become a corporation. I will speak new language. Instead of going to get a haircut I will visit an accountant every month to style my image.

I simply love this idea. Wanna steal it? Run with it? Who wants to join this project?

Talk to me at http://kombinat.us/blogger

a sort of a homecoming

2005-04-19T00:34:00.000-04:00

Sending Hello! Been a while. Travelled a bit. Visited many places. So now I shall welcome myself back. Back to this conversation creation molecular realignment of meaning making production.

Freedom did get me there a bit Harry. Been battling the Warren Commission. I told them I saw that dude in Dallas on a grassy knoll but they still concluded that JFK died of self inflicted gun shot wounds. So much for bearing witness.

And yes Jeneane, I've first visited Pope Johannes Paulus Secundus in December of 1987 at Cite Du Vatican. I was young and full of dreams and I told him I was going to change the world and work for Peace on Earth. He just smiled. - Ever since then I've been embarassed of my dreams. Dreams don't work. So what works? - Human beings have been engaged in this discourse for a long time. Nice Paradox it is. - Let it be, Let it be - Love

Pope is dead. I see him with a Tralfamadorian dimension. All slices of life. As a side note: Tralfamadorians saw Time in it's entirety. They saw its beginning and end, thus a person's life was seen at all possible points of time of their existence and not only the moment you met them. Nice way to see someone. You could see a killer on TV and weep for he was once an innocent baby. You could see a baby and wonder what kind of Human Being-ness will he have along the way towards death. - Alas we don't see people this way. Too bad. It's a lot of fun.

Seth Godin has a new marketing book and a new website for it. It's completely idiotic. I've read most of his other books. They too are idiotic. But he is having fun. Perhaps duping us, the readers - selling us the Dream. New shapes of Dreams. Marketing the Marketing Dream. I think if I was him I would be too embarassed to constantly write so much Kaka De La Torro and maintain the excitement of continuous innovation. I am not sure that the world needs another marketing book, and from Seth Godin for that matter. I do hope that what the world needs is people teaching other people how to read and write so they can express their grievances to Governments that oppress them and articulate their commitments so that others know what you find worth living for.

Gonzo Programming Language Manual.

2005-02-12T20:14:00.000-05:00

Why's (Poignant) Guide to Ruby :: 2. Kon'nichi wa, Ruby:

"Pretend that you’ve opened this book (although you probably have opened this book), just to find a huge onion right in the middle crease of the book. (The manufacturer of the book has included the onion at my request.)

So you’re like, “Wow, this book comes with an onion!” (Even if you don’t particularly like onions, I’m sure you can appreciate the logistics of shipping any sort of produce discreetly inside of an alleged programming manual.)

Then you ask yourself, “Wait a minute. I thought this was a book on Ruby, the incredible new programming language from Japan. And although I can appreciate the logistics of shipping any sort of produce discreetly inside of an alleged programming manual: Why an onion? What am I supposed to do with it?”

No. Please don’t puzzle over it. You don’t need to do anything with the onion. Set the onion aside and let it do something with you.

I’ll be straight with you. I want you to cry. To weep. To whimper sweetly. This book is a poignant guide to Ruby. That means code so beautiful that tears are shed. That means gallant tales and somber truths that have you waking up the next morning in the arms of this book. Hugging it tightly to you all the day long. If necessary, fashion a makeshift hip holster for Why’s (Poignant) Guide to Ruby, so you can always have this book’s tender companionship.

You really must sob once. Or at least sniffle. And if not, then the onion will make it all happen for you"

RUBY! The OFFicial PROgramming LANGuage of GOnzo MARKETING!!!
Pass The ONIONS!!!

SpamBlog: 3 Dish Network Satellite TV Dish Network Free Instal

2005-02-02T16:14:00.000-05:00

3 Dish Network Satellite TV Dish Network Free Instal. Excellent usage of Blogger by spammers.

Gonzo Engaged Blogger

2005-02-02T16:12:00.000-05:00

Stories from the Front Lines
A blog by a high school biology teacher and 20-something single gal in NYC. Kelly writes today "Started reproduction today. You haven't lived until you've talked about reproduction to rooms full of south Bronx teenagers.". Wow. Kelly, thanks for teaching! Gonzo Kudos to you.

Rageboy goes to Westpoint

2005-02-02T07:24:00.000-05:00

At least the American Army is excited about Cluetrain. The news coming from Rageboy aka Chris Locke aka Chief Blogging Officer is pretty incredible. He is Unleashing the Power of Army Profession. Definitely must read.

2004-12-22T00:12:00.000-05:00

Three Kinds of Men
There are three kinds of men:
The ones that learn by reading.
The few who learn by observation.
The rest of them have to pee on the electric fence for themselves.

*** Gonzo mo:Blogged ***

2004-12-20T09:41:00.000-05:00

Ken,
Gonzo Marketing has gone to bed with Corporations, as it should be after a brief dating. This is a time for courtship and also a little bit of drinking and late night foreplay. Perhaps some hard core fucking and blogjobs. Corporations and Gonzo Marketing are now discovering each other. Each a bit shy during the day but willing and lustful at night. I think we'll see them going steady soon. For now just keep noticing their attaction to each other, isn't it beautiful?

2004-12-04T14:26:00.000-05:00

Navel Gazing
The danger is in becoming infatuated with ones navel. Too much gazing degenerates into sitting on a red sofa masturbating in public.

*** mo:Blogged ***

Why Do We Blog?

2004-12-04T13:57:00.000-05:00

It's not all about Gonzo. Sometimes a little navel gazing is good for the spirit. It can, I think, keep our Gonzo engaged.

2004-12-01T21:30:00.000-05:00

Bedtime for Gonzo?
I'm just wondering, of myself as much as of anyone, where has the Gonzo gone?

Marek my long lost friend, consider this an encrypted echo back from the metaverse. Decode it, and untold peace and harmony will be bestowed upon some complete stranger.

*** mo:Blogged ***

Why do You Blog?

2004-12-01T09:20:00.000-05:00

I don't know. Really I don't know. It's like I am sending these encrypted messages out there into the universe. The universe resonds sometimes. Sometimes not. I am sending signals. Hello, I say. Hello! and I just want to someone to hear my Hello! I don't even need a response back, I don't need the universe to talk back to me. I just want to know that it listens. It's like love I guess. It's love when someone just listens.

Paynter, you bastard!

2004-10-17T00:14:00.000-04:00

Happy Halloween

Life Stealing

2004-10-16T23:40:00.000-04:00

Someone is stealing your life
---
by Michael Ventura
---
(Excerpted from LA Weekly 26-Jan-90)

Most American adults wake around 6 ot 7 in the morning. Get to work at 8 or 9. Knock off around 5. Home again, 6-ish. Fifty weeks a year. For about 45 years.

Most are glad to have the work, but don't really choose it. They may dream, they may study and even train for work they intensely want; but sooner or later, for most, that doesn't pan out. Then they take what they can and make do. Most have families to aupport, so they need their jobs more than their jobs admit to needing them. They're employees. And, as employees, most have no say whatsoever about much of anything on the job. The purpose or service, the short and long-term goals of the company, are considered quite literally "none of their business" - though these issues drastically influence every aspect of their lives. No matter that they've given years to the day-to-day survival of the business; employees (even when they're called "managers") mostly take orders. Or else. It seems an odd way to structure a free society: Most people have little or no authority over what they do five days a week for 45 years. Doesn't sound much like "life, liberty, and the pursuit of
happiness." Sounds like a nation of drones.

It used to be that one's compensation for being an American drone was the freedom to live in one's own house, in one's own quirky way, in a clean and safe community in which your children had the chance to be happier, richer drones than you. But working stiffs can't afford houses now, fewer communities are clean, none are safe, and your kid's prospects are worse. (This condition may be because for five days a week, for 45 years, you had no say - while other people have been making decisions that haven't been good for you.) I'm not sure whose happiness we've been pursuing lately, but one thing is clear: It's not the happiness of those who've done our society's work.

On the other hand - or so they say - you're free, and if you don't like your job you can pursue happiness by starting a business of your very own, by becoming an "independent" entrepreneur. But you're only as independent as your credit rating. And to compete in the business community, you'll find yourself having to treat others - your employees - as much like slaves as you can get away with. Pay them as little as they'll tolerate and give them no say in anything, because that's what's most efficient and profitable. Money is the absolute standard. Freedom, and the dignity and well-being of one's fellow creatures, simply don't figure in the basic formula.

This may seem a fairly harsh way to state the rules America now lives by. But if I sound radical, it's not from doing a lot of reading in some cozy university, then dashing off to dispense opinion as a prima donna of the alternative press. I learned about drones by droning. From ages 18 to 29 (minus a few distracted months at college when I was 24) I worked the sort of jobs that I expected to have all my life: typesetter for two years, tape transcriber for three, proofreader (a grossly incompetent one) for a few weeks, messenger for a few months, and secretary (yes, secretary) for a year and a half. Then I stopped working steadily and the jobs got funkier: hospital orderly, vacuum-cleaner salesman, Jack-in-the-Box counterperson,
waiter, nail hammerer, cement mixer, toilet scrubber, driver.

It was during the years of office work that I caught on: I got two weeks' paid vacation per year. A year has 52 weeks. Even a comparatively unskilled, uneducated worker like me, who couldn't (still can't) do fractions or long division - even I had enough math to figure that two goes into 52 ... how many times? Twenty-sic. Meaning it would take me 26 years on the job to accumulate one year for myself. And I could only have that in 26 pieces, so it wouldn't even feel like a year. In other words, no time was truly mine. My boss merely allowed me an illusion of freedom, a little space in which to catch my breath, in between the 50 weeks that I lived that he owned. My employer uses 26 years of my life for every year I get to keep. And what do I get in return for this enormous thing I am giving? What do I get in return
for my life?

A paycheck that's as skimpy as they can get away with. If I'm lucky, some health insurance. (If I'm really lucky, the employer's definition of "health" will include my teeth and my eyes - maybe even my mind.) And, in a truly enlightened workplace, just enough pension or "profit-sharing" to keep me sweet but not enough to make life different. And that's it.

Compare this to what my employer gets: If the company is successful, he (it's usually a he) gets a standard of living beyond my wildest dreams, including what I would consider fantastic protection for his family, and a world of access that I can only pitifully mimic by changing channels on my TV. His standard of living wouldn't be possible without the labor of people like me - but my employer doesn't think that's a very significant fact. He certainly doesn't think that this fact entitles me to any say about the business. Not to mention a significant share in ownership. Oh no. The business is his to do with as he pleases, and he owns my work. Period.

I don't mean that bosses don't work. Most work hard, and have the satisfaction of knowning that what they do is thiers. Great. The problem is: What I do is theirs too. Yet if my companion workers and I didn't do what we do - then nobody would be anybody's. So how come what we do is hardly ours? How come he can get rich while we're lucky to break even? How come he can do anything he wants with the company without consulting us, yet we do the bulk of the work and take the brunt of the consequences?

The only answer provided is that the employer came up with the money to start the enterprise in the first place; hence, he and his money people decide everything and get all the benefits.

Excuse me, but that seems a little unbalanced. It doesn't take into account that nothing happens unless work is done. Shouldn't it follow that, work being so important, the doers of that work deserve a more just formula for measuring who gets what? There's no doubt that the people who risked or raised the money to form a company, or bail it out of trouble, deserve a fair return on their investment - but is it fair that they get everything? It takes more than investment and management to make a company live. It takes the labor, skill, and talent of the people who do the company's work. Isn't that an investment? Doesn't it deserve a fair return, a voice, a share of the power?

I know this sounds awfully simplistic, but no school ever taught me anything about the ways of economics and power (perhaps because they didn't want me to know), so I had to figure it out slowly, based on what I saw around me every day. And I saw:

That it didn't matter how long I worked or what a good job I did. I could get incremental raises, perhaps even medical benefits and a few bonuses, but I would not be allowed power over my own life - no power over the fundamental decisions on which my life depends. My future is in the hands of people whose names I often don't know and whom I never meet. Their investment is the only factor taken seriously. They feed on my work, on my life, but reserve for themselves all power, perogative, and profit.

Slowly, very slowly, I came to a conclusion that for me was fundamental: My employwers are stealing my life.

They. Are. Stealing. My. Life.

If the people who do the work don't own some part of the product, and don't have any power over what happens to their enterprise - they are being robbed.

And don't think for a minute that those who are robbing you don't know they are robbing you. They know how much they get from you and how little they give back. They are thieves. They are stealing your life.

The assembly-line worker isn't responsible for the decimation of the American auto industry, for instance. Those responsible are those who've been hurt least, executives and stockholders who, according to the Los Angeles Times, make 50 to 500 times what the assembly-line worker makes, but who've done a miserable job of managing. Yet it's the workers who suffer most. Layoffs, plant closings, and such are no doubt necessary - like the bumper stickers say, shit happens - but it is not necessary that workers have no power in the fundamental management decisions involved.

As a worker, I am not an "operating cost." I am how the job gets done. I am the job. I am the company. Without me and my companion workers, there's nothing. I'm willing to take my lumps in a world in which little is certain, but I deserve a say. Not just some cosmetic "input," but significant power in good times or bad. A place at the table where decisions are made. Nothing less is fair. So nothing less is moral.

And if you, as owners or management or government, deny me this - then you are choosing not to be moral, and you are committing a crime against me. Do you expect me not to struggle?

Do you expect us to be forever passive while you get rich stealing our lives?

Birth of The Corporation.

2004-09-13T17:24:00.000-04:00

get disincorporated

Worst Practices, Best Ads

2004-08-16T16:46:00.000-04:00

Grant Henninger thinks Wells Fargo holds the title for "Best line in any ad. Ever." He may be right. I just heard the ad that prompted Grant's excitement, and it does rock out loud that Wells has its lemonade-and-free-checking hawking youngster explain, when asked if she can print out statements, "I'm not allowed to use the computer since I got sued for downloading music."

Wells has strong competition though from the Co-Op Network for credit unions, which promises (on its billboard at the 405/110 interchange, and elsewhere) ATMs "Out the Wazoo!"

[Cross-posted from B&B]

Resuming Normalcy As Once We Knew It

2004-06-25T15:08:00.000-04:00

It seems apparent that the firestorm over the temporarily lost blogs has calmed to the point of only being a partially smoldering reminder of its former self.

Some of us moved to other blogging clients, other hosting services. Some of us just waited it out and resumed blogging at the newly created facility which seems to be the heir to weblogs.com, that being buzzword.com, a site run by Rogers Cadenhead.

Some had already abandoned their blogs, and this either awakened them and prompted a rennaissance, or clarified and reiterated their status as deadblogs.

Then there are those of us who created a fauxblog in a personally hosted space, and who are still waiting to see what else shakes out (hello, weblogger.com, et al!!).

My take: continue to use the fauxblog, simultaneously post the same items on the buzzword.com blog, and see what the near future may bring.

One more important note: the backup facility, to get one's entire weblogs.com history up to and until the pages went dark, is working. Like a charm, I might add.

And to his credit, Rogers is reactive to the discussion group, and responds to user questions. He and Dave have been using deanland.weblogs.com in somewhat of a beta capacity, and that's fine with me. I am glad to see the blog have other uses, productive ones, at that. I'd posted some questions in the Discussion Area and in e-mails; some were how-to questions, some were what-if questions, and others were general queries. Almost all have been addressed, and some of them seem to require some analysis or development time before an answer can be offered.

This is a welcome and appreciated method, with open communication and a sense of there being goals and all parties involved having some input. Even the tech-challenged, such as yours truly.

The period of days during the firestorm, at some points reaching peaks of rage and hostility, seems to have revived the spirits of some of the bloggers. I addressed this in my open letter di scussing the return of DeanLand via the fauxblog my son and his pal created for me. I was fortunate in having my tech-savvy son there, ready to put together a band-aid solution for me. After 4+ years of creating what one friend properly characterized as "my brand," my most pressing concern was to get back on the blogosphere, maintain the ability to post, and have a forum in which to do so.

Not every blogger using weblogs.com had that luxury.

It was a discomfiting time, but things seem to be mellowing out, returning to something that approximates Normalcy As We Once Knew It. If, indeed, ever we did know such a thing.

Unveiling the Islamic train

2004-06-22T09:04:00.000-04:00

The amazingly polylingual Iggy at Blogalization offers a work in progress translation of an Al Jazeera text which, says Iggy, "reads something like an Islamic Cluetrain Manifesto."

The original text, entitled The Islamic Internet: Where are its flaws?, by Khatib al-Mu'tazz, can be found here with Iggy's translation.

A few snips:
Different standards apply in this virtual world than in its real counterpart, which was once ruled by intimate ties of human consanguinity. This virtual mathematical realm puts each individual into contact with the entire world, granting him access to the ideas of every philosophical and religious tendency. It is this that dissolves established social and educational roles, detracts from the exercise of moral guardianship, and undermines thought founded upon one authoritative source.

Indeed there is a fundamental social symptom that we can attribute directly to the Internet: the tendency toward "uncovering and unveiling." On the Internet, the naked face of every person is on open display, together with their similarities and their subtle differences.

...although the Internet is considered a product of modernity and of the Western intellectual tradition, we discover that Islamist (and especially Salafi) discourse continues to view the present from the point of view of an imminent end of the world in its evaluation of the world, so that the Internet becomes equivalent in their eyes to what they call the mere "wisdom of the moment," a mere "gathering at the marketplaces", an "ephemeral coming together," the "circulation of trade," the "dissemination of immorality," the "rise of usury" and the "cornucopeia of lies."

If the world has indeed contracted into the tiny, intimate "global village" which modern thought regards as one of the great accomplishments of globalization, then that change itself is viewed by the Salafi as "a clear sign that we are living at the end of time,"...

The piece goes on to explore other views, in which, instead of shrinking the world (which has "monstrous" implications for the cultural view described by al-Mu'tazz), the Internet is described as a new world that has opened new territories. From this perspective, al-Mu'tazz offers a memorable description of "the old school," which, he memorably says, "tends to approach the Internet like a man screaming in a canyon."

The piece moves toward sketching a vision of a more complex view of the Net and how Islam can approach it. It's a good read.

OK already

2004-06-21T22:53:00.000-04:00

Been gone so long, I know - but I have a valid excuse. Really.

Found this site about two months ago...been incapable of coherent thought since.

New template full of minty freshness. I like it.

Now back to the pickles.

P.S...

2004-06-21T11:22:00.000-04:00

That's POSSE, not PU....

children!

Gonzo Enraged

2004-06-21T11:19:00.000-04:00

Listen, gonzo engaged participants, what is, is. Stop jumping up and down. Now, another new template is in place. Sorry the other one was so sucky, but I'm in the middle of 25 other things over here, and I gave it a shot.

If you wish to continue posting to Gonzo, please update your blogger profiles within the next week. Otherwise I'll assume you don't want to post to the blog anymore and will delete your ass completely. Reason being, it's kinda nice the way blogger has set up the "Contributors" section of the template to pull your blogger profile info, which shows ALL the blogs you post to, as well as things you probably don't want readers of gonzo engaged to know, like your email address and town of residence.

Ah well, another day...

Stay out of the template for now. Or consult your local posse before entering.

...

2004-06-21T10:47:00.000-04:00

Paraphrased from myself some time ago -

I'm not sure when things will pick up significantly here. Reaching for roots. Questing about for that gritty realism that makes the words feel valuable rather than mundane. As I read here, I find we've become so mundane that even I'd delete us from my blogroll.

I've got an excuse. Yeah I know changing career paths and moving across the country is a feeble fucking excuse, but it's an excuse. Where the hell are the rest of you motherfuckers? Did you all drink the fucking koolaid and slip into a stupor? I'll be alive again (and enraged, outraged, engaged), but some of you all seem to have gone into stasis. Maybe it's time to start yanking plugs out.

Our collective writing of late has been de-fucking-plorable.

Read Scoble from a year or two ago and read Scoble today. Is this what we've all become. Shoot my ass.

I've hosted you for free for all these years and this is what I get?

2004-06-21T10:40:00.000-04:00

FIRST of all, epeus, you came along and whacked the sidebar. Well fuck. That sucks. I went and found everyone's blog and made the blogroll and now it's gone.

AS for the typeface and template, well you are correct. It does suck. Bad. Especially now that the SIDEBAR is gone.

Look, I don't want to write an entire essay on this, because my feeling is, people really don't read essays.

So just hold on and I'll try to fix the problem myself, because I doubt a posse of men will come along and do it for me.

People just love to jump up and down.

I miss the old template

2004-06-21T03:23:00.000-04:00

I fixed the author thingy, but this one really is very ugly, and you blew away our technorati claims too.
I'm all for moving with the times, but how about picking one of he templates that looks less like it forgot what we learned about onscreen typefaces in the last 15 years?

I went and did this because I could.

2004-06-21T00:27:00.000-04:00

Some things look different here. That is a good thing. They also looked different previously. Now, they look more different than before. BUT then.

Did I ask you? No, I just did it.
Did I mess you up? No, you hardly ever write here, and you still can!
Did I brighten your day? Absofuckinglutely.

I have a problem though. All is not working well. We have a missing doodadder. The little doodadder that might tell our generous readers which blogger has posted which post is missing from the footer of each post. I think there is some kind of profile container tag-like thing, which would include the poster's name-and-link-to-blogger-profile, that must be inserted into the template, if I could figure out how to do it.

It might have been there once. It might be gone now. I have no clue.

I am going to go ask on my blog for someone to tell me where into the template to insert what HTML doodadder that will indicate, in the footer of each post, who the poster is. Or whom. I'm too tired to think it through. Not the template. The who or whom thing.

ALSO, my dear and esteemed colleagues, I have not a damn clue who writes over here anymore besides the folks on the right. If you're not listed and you plan to post before the year 2010, email me and I'll add you. If you're not on the team and would like to be, email me and if I don't think your email is spam, I might possibly read it and add you in, say, within one day to one week, depending.

I would say sometime after July 1st, but someone beat me too that this week.

Oh, love to all.

--jeneane

pit of my stomach

2004-06-11T00:25:00.000-04:00

can't tell, really, whether it is the latest conference, the garlic ravioli, or the mix of night time medicines I've taken that has tied a knot in my stomach. I think it's the BlogOn conference, but it might be mixing Levaquin and Celexa, or it might be the cheese Ravioli from Bergamos. What do you think? I think it might be the conference. Whatever it is, it hurts like hell just now, and I'm lying on my side typing for lack of a better way to handle it. Dearest brethren. I take wing when I read how much you care about what we say, what we do, who we are. You still care. I care too. Except the words. They too make knots in my stomach. Every day something ties knots. Everyday I try to write them free. I used to be able to write them untied. But now I can't seem to untwist the double-knots. It's not every day I read about a BlogOn conference, nor is it every day I have to take Levaquin at night, and this is, after all, the first time I've had Bergamos ravioli. So, I'd like to think of this most recent pain as an anomalie. But it's been coming. Little knots, tighter knots, all trapped up inside this editing window, this screen.

I used to see inside the screen. I used to see beyond the white and blue to a new world outside of any familiar dimension. I used to see you and you and you. I used to see everything--every single thing--and nothing, and both had meaning.

Now I see pixels and letters and words.

Yes, it is probably the Ravioli.

I think you're right.

Write Now

2004-06-10T10:13:00.000-04:00

Dear Jeneane,
You have my vote for sticking a fork in blogging and calling it done. The post mortem will probably show the time of death as somewhere about the time I started blogging. certainly it was dead by the time of the bizarro Blogger-Con, that event where creativity, authorship, and the craft of writing were subordinated to the ego and get-rich-and-powerful fantasies of the Big Gouda himself.

Recently, when Gary Turner's Memoria Technica went white-screen, I stole a good line from somewhere and suggested that "not blogging is the new black." By this I meant of course, that if Gary Turner was (not) doing it, then it was high avant fashion.

I like these little on-line spaces that people have labeled blogs. They're a convenient place to hoist first drafts into the light of day. For some, they're a medium and for others they're an intermediate step to the final product. Regardless, they really beat the ruled pad and the number two pencil.

I have been so happy to hang out with a set of genii and excellent writers, people who basically get what I'm saying when I say it and are fairly accepting of much of my more nonsensical and outre utterances. I don't think community necessarily dissolves as boundary conditions shift. But I could be wrong. Look at the cities, the suburbs and the motor car.

For now, thank you Nina June. Thank you for the reminder that it is really about the writing. After a few years anywhere we get so stuck with cliches and commonplaces rattling around our brains that we need a good shake or an ultrasound treatment to chip them loose. High time I took the old cranial unit into the hygienist and swept out the dusty corners of my (don't call it a blog!) online publishing space.

Bada bingo... best regards from the spill-chucker,

fp

Blogging is Dead. Long live Writng

2004-06-09T01:47:00.000-04:00

Dear J.
I received your email. Much thanks. Much love to you.
Blogging is dead you say. Yes, we buried Blogging a long time ago. Fishrush was one of the first who buried blogging. Others followed. Most are still trying to reinvent blogging. It will not be so. Blogging is dead. There is no going back.

Writing is alive you say. Yes, we are writing again. Writing about dreams and fears and spanish guitar sounds and moss covered trees and sex and love and loneliness and angst.

Solution is poetry. It remains so. It's always been this way. Is poetry solution?

Somewhere in between there is resignation, cynicism and love and hope. All practical and completely impractical things that humans have always done and will continue to do.

And we constantly rediscover ourselves. Gain answers. Loser answers. Search for answers. Curse that we ever found those answers. Then found out the answers were not the answers to find. Then found out there are no answers to have. Then found out that the answer about the answers was not the answer to have as an answer, which begets more questions. But as long as the music is on we dance. And we dance. And we dance.

...solution is poetry the solution is poetry the solution is poetry the solution is???

Signal. Signal. Sendig Signal.

Ba Ba Bidi Bi Blocks.
Bird changes Gold Cage's Golden locks
Birdy, bi, ba bada bi bi!!!!
You got got got a new gold key.

For you new golden cage, age age.
Ba Ba Bidi Bi Ba.
Keep on changing keys keys keys
Bada bi bis bis bis

Peekaboo! to you all.

Letters to Brethren, Part 1

2004-06-08T21:51:00.000-04:00

Dear Ones,

I have been receiving the emails. I understand the passion, the mission, and who it is we should piss on. The problem, really, is this: meaning.

I understand.

To make meaning of the agony, something beyond/outside/other than/more than/for him/her/them// untangling the mass in the gut and splitting it up, like a cheese pizza, to share with you and you and me.

We eat off one another, soul food, relaying what we can one from the next. SOS. Watch out. I don't want this for you. My brothers. I don't want this for you.

I want that for you--hot sun turns your forearms brown, browner still, sea salt and mountain trails new with rain.

The point of it is that when we come this far--to the place where only our pain holds meaning, we unfold.

Show that. Write that. Tell that.

Show yourself. Let her see you.

In love, dear brothers,

Jeneane

geatest story ever sold

2004-02-24T20:41:00.000-05:00

Mel Gibson's first serious foray into splatter genre cinema, The Passion of the Christ, opens on thousands of screens worldwide today. As if you didn’t know. Named by one US critic as “fetishistically violent” and by dozens of biblical scholars as anti-Semitic or just plain historically wrong, there’s no escaping a vanity project the auteur himself once identified as a potential “career killer.”
This spiritual Ishtar, financed by Gibson, seemed at one interval doomed to fail. It contains no stars, it’s not in English and the likelihood that it would be anywhere near as good as the book was always remote. Yet, media observers are predicting that Passion will enjoy enviable success in its opening pre-Oscar weekend.
"People think I'm crazy, and maybe I am," Gibson said in September 2002 at a news conference in Rome prior to commencing production. "But maybe I'm a genius.”
Whatever the case, modest Mel, who wrote, directed and produced this hulking gore-fest, is set to make a profit befitting a mastermind.
Why!? By many accounts, this product is difficult to endure. If ten minute long flagellation burlesques don’t send you home annoyed, there’s a good chance that dealing with the sound of a rather guttural dead language as interpreted by someone with a face-full of Special Wound Effects make-up will.
Passion should not be an easy product to shift. Yet it is poised to turn a remarkable profit. Marketing graduates of the future will almost certainly study the success of Gibson’s cultural warfare and agree that this is the Greatest Story Every Sold.
Gibson's film company, Icon Productions, may have given exemplary lessons to students of guerrilla marketing.
Last month a widespread and persistent rumour arose that Pope John Paul II was so moved by the flick that he uttered "It is as it was" after credits rolled. This was later denied by the Vatican. The Holy Father, said a secretary, did not give this nor any other feature the two Papal thumbs up.
Icon has eagerly welcomed large group bookings made by clergy. Its Australian website states that the company will liaise “with cinemas on behalf of individual churches” to ensure seating. Gibson’s mass-to-grass approach has also seen many preaching for the film worldwide from virtual pulpits. Emails, websites and faxes overflow with filmic faith and fury.
Investigation of the film’s merchandise reveals a natty “Nail Pendant” . Just like the ones Jesus wore at Easter. Made of pewter and available in two sizes, each with Isaiah 53:5 inscribed on the side, they will set you back $12.99 and $16.99 respectively.
Classiest of all, perhaps, was the appearance a Chevrolet at the 2004 Daytona 500 featuring a special Passion paint scheme.
“I got a kick out of the NASCAR stock car hood. I always suspected that Jesus loved hot rodding, and this only confirms it” says freelance journalist Christopher Noxon from his in-laws’ home in Los Angeles.
Noxon’s interest in publicity strategies deployed by Gibson for Passion is quite personal. For the better part of a year, Noxon himself has functioned as one of Icon Productions most successful marketing implements.
Noxon’s role in the relentless promotion of Passion is curious and complex. This is the guy who first shed a little light on Mel’s faith, Catholic Traditionalism, and the Gibson financed Malibu Church, The Holy Family. He rose to national prominence last year when he shed a little more light on the peccadilloes of one of the Catholic Traditionalist movement’s more vocal commentators, Hutton Gibson.
The freelance journalist, to use Mel’s own analogy in his recent conversation with US journalist Diane Sawyer, is the very same who first tried “to drive a wedge between me and my father."
In stirring up publicity for Passion, Mel has been eager to make enemies. (Of American columnist Frank Rich, Gibson was reported as saying, "I want to kill him. I want his intestines on a stick. ... I want to kill his dog.".) Noxon can lay legitimate claim to being the first “enemy” accused by Mel of attempting to discredit his faith and his film’s pro-Christian message.
Just how was Noxon initially drawn into playing Lucifer to Mel’s marketing martyr?
“My Dad retired a few years ago and bought a house in the countryside near LA. He was out hiking one day and he saw some surveyors’ stakes” says Noxon.
“(Dad) is part of a local neighbourhood group that looked at new developments, mainly big tracts of mini-malls and such. (He) set up a meeting with the developers and found they were called the A P Reilly Foundation, a non profit group. He was curious about it and asked some questions …. They said it was (run by) ‘a very spiritual figure on the world’s stage’. They wouldn’t name the benefactor.”
“I ran the tax information about A P Reilly…and it turns out….. A P Reilly is the name of Mel Gibson’s deceased mother.”
Noxon learned that Gibson financed a church that “didn’t seem like Garden Variety Catholicism.”
“At the time I thought ‘that’s an interesting celebrity titbit’ but it really wasn’t anything I was inclined to write about.”
Then, “news of the movie percolated out of Italy and then I found out about Hutton Gibson while poking around on the internet.” Noxon felt he had the makings of a story and successfully pitched to the New York Times.
While Noxon was preparing the article for press, he attempted contact several times with Mel Gibson via publicist Alan Nierob. Repeated requests for interview explained that the article sought to explore Mel’s faith within the context of his Passion movie project. Noxon requested that Mel discuss his faith “explicitly so there’s no misunderstanding. They ignored that letter. So I just went about interviewing people. Then I located Hutton Gibson down in Texas and he invited me to visit him. I spent the weekend with him. … I went down, I interviewed him and clearly it was pretty explosive stuff. I came back to LA and wrote a letter saying that I had spoken to Hutton, other members of the Traditionalist community and that I had attended a service at Mel’s Church.”
Noxon interviewed Mel’s father early in 2003. With doddery zeal, Papa Gibson questioned the veracity of the Holocaust, denied that Al Qaeda hijackers had anything to do with the September 11 attacks and called the Second Vatican Council ''a Masonic plot backed by the Jews”.
“I wrote to Mel’s people and said I’ve interviewed the father and I wish you’d weigh in. I included some quotes from the father expecting to get a public statement if not a direct interview. Instead I got an eight page single spaced letter threatening to sue me. This came From a guy named Marty Singer who is a notorious journalist suppressor here in LA He is used by Schwarzenegger and J Lo and others who are mainly trying to stop stalk-a-razzi. I think he charges $400 an hour.” Singer, as it happens, is sometimes known as Mad Dog.
None of Noxon’s investigations had been published when the cease-and-desist novella arrived on his doorstep.. After initial shock from the legal volley wore off, and he was assured by the New York Times that his “ass” would be covered, Noxon resumed work on his piece.
A week or so later, Noxon turned on FOX News program The O’Reilly Factor only to find himself being directly addressed by Mel Gibson.
This, says Noxon, “was the first big public explosion. It was insane. I was sitting at home in my pyjamas gob smacked. There was some horrified screaming and jumping around. I couldn’t take it in.”
Noxon, his piece still unpublished, was called by anchor Bill O’Reilly a “slimy hit man for the left”.
“I really wanted to put that on a t shirt” Noxon says.
During the interview, which became fodder for future news programs,. “Mel looks into the camera and he raises his eye brows and says ‘watch out!’ It’s so cheesy.”
One has to wonder about the upshot of a threat, however theatrical, made by Mad Max himself.
“It was deeply surreal. It was very strange. But also kind of cool.” Says Noxon.
The story Is The Pope Catholic…Enough? appeared in the Times. Noxon “kept waiting for the summons to arrive.”
It didn’t. A year on, Noxon is not too anxious, figuring “ there’s so many targets that I’m just one amongst them.”
On the eve of the film’s release, Noxon observes that “the primary reason the movie is going to open so big is all the publicity. So much publicity and so much controversy and now everyone wants to know what the big deal is about. Every evangelical minister in the country is publicising from the pulpit.”
Noxon is ambivalent about his own role in fanning the flames of debate. He is uncertain if Gibson’s reaction represents radical paranoia or acute marketing savvy.
So, is Mel a genius, or is he crazy?
Noxon is unsure.
“I should make the point” says Noxon “that I didn’t ever intend to write the story “Mel’s a loony Christian”. I don’t believe that all Catholic Traditionalists are necessarily insane. I don’t even know that Mel Gibson is insane.”
Perhaps, theorises Noxon, “all of this has been a pre-planned publicity stunt. And if so, it was a master stroke.”

Random Technospeak

2004-02-19T21:20:00.000-05:00

"Developing enterprise-scale applications today requires an approach to software architecture that helps architects evolve their solutions in flexible ways. This approach should permit reuse of existing efforts in the context of new capabilities that implement business functionality in a timely fashion, even as the target infrastructure itself is evolving"

Badabing World! The Struggle Continues! For Clear Communication! For Life! For Breath of Fresh Air! For badabing and BadaBing! For Peekaboo Moments of Clarity! For Love.

What if the eyes can't see?

2004-02-05T16:05:00.000-05:00

"   Lear.   

O, ho, are you there with me? No 

eyes in your head, nor no money in your 

purse? Your eyes are in a heavy case, your 

purse in a light: yet you see how this world 

goes. 



   Gloucester   

I see it feelingly. 



   Lear   

What, art mad? A man may see 

how this world goes with no eyes. Look with 

thine ears: see how yond justice rails upon 

yond simple thief. Hark, in thine ear: change 

places; and, handy-dandy, which is the justice, 

which is the thief? Thou hast seen a 

farmer's dog bark at a beggar?"

William Shakespeare, King Lear, Act IV, Scene VI:

Where in Amerika is Captain Brierly these days?

2004-02-04T17:10:00.000-05:00

' "Ay, sir, Captain Brierly will be remembered here, if there's no
other place on earth. I wrote fully to his father and did not get a
word in reply--neither Thank you, nor Go to the devil!--nothing!
Perhaps they did not want to know."

'The sight of that watery-eyed old Jones mopping his bald head
with a red cotton handkerchief, the sorrowing yelp of the dog, the
squalor of that fly-blown cuddy which was the only shrine of his
memory, threw a veil of inexpressibly mean pathos over Brierly's
remembered figure, the posthumous revenge of fate for that belief
in his own splendour which had almost cheated his life of its legitimate
terrors. Almost! Perhaps wholly. Who can tell what flattering
view he had induced himself to take of his own suicide?

' "Why did he commit the rash act, Captain Marlow--can you
think?" asked Jones, pressing his palms together. "Why? It beats
me! Why?" He slapped his low and wrinkled forehead. "If he had
been poor and old and in debt--and never a show--or else mad.
But he wasn't of the kind that goes mad, not he. You trust me.
What a mate don't know about his skipper isn't worth knowing.
Young, healthy, well off, no cares. . . . I sit here sometimes thinking,
thinking, till my head fairly begins to buzz. There was some reason."

' "You may depend on it, Captain Jones," said I, "it wasn't
anything that would have disturbed much either of us two," I said;
and then, as if a light had been flashed into the muddle of his brain,
poor old Jones found a last word of amazing profundity. He blew
his nose, nodding at me dolefully: "Ay, ay! neither you nor I, sir,
had ever thought so much of ourselves."

- Chapter 6 from "Lord Jim" by Joseph Conrad

To think so much of yourself never to be able to just be yourself, the way you are, the way you are not. Cheating life of its opportunity to let you know that life itself is your greatest partner in what so many times seems to be a bloody fight of mere daily existence.

Yet the formidable opponent is but a cloaked friend for should you ever know his true nature you might want to stop your daily toilings and give up, and then cheat life itself from the opportunity to be engaged with you.

Let the mystery stand then. Let the blood be spilled and to the end keep giving up the desire to know. In not knowing there is a space to breathe and continue the conversation.

So, don't be like Captain Brierly my friend, that narcissistic motherfucker.

Quixote and Sancho Conversationalists

2004-01-30T02:32:00.000-05:00

Hello all Conversationalists of Planet Earth
(yes, it's still called planet Earth but known only as such to poor children of Ethiopia. To the rest of us known as Underdeveloped Land with Real Estate boom potential)
Anyway, the following from Terry Castel about Cervantes in The Atlantic. and I repeat it here for you, all you conversationalists thus attempting to save us from the lunacy of shared barren landspace of Amerikan Kultural Landscape.

"Cervantes had a faith in conversation, in paying attention to others, in bonding with strangers, in speaking, reading, and writing across all kinds of human barriers. The sharing of stories—stories of real life, not the fabrications of romance—had the power, he grasped, to assuage madness, loneliness, and pain. Quixote and Sancho are great, life-saving conversationalists. Their friendship lives on and dilates in the absurd, meandering, yet touching debates they have with each other. At bottom both seem to want to prolong their chivalrous adventures precisely in order to prolong the pleasures of listening and speaking, speaking and listening. And in turn they speak—and listen with attention—to every "noble stranger" they meet on the road.

In the fantasy of shared authorship Cervantes would seem to allegorize a broader vision of human fellowship. Hearing another voice, taking in another's story, is the essential thing—the humanizing component in an otherwise bleak landscape. It saves us from our lunacy and pride, both personal and cultural. "

Let our BadaBing save us from the personal lunacy and our Peekaboo! from our Cultural Lunacy and Stupid Pride.

What's practical about Love?

2004-01-26T18:05:00.000-05:00

I fell in love. - There I was minding my own life. Scratching my ass from time to time. Caughing. Eating. Sleeping. Having Sex. Jerking Off. Some more eating and some more sleeping and some driving to work and back from work and going to the store and paying my bills and listening to music and reading books. All this time not knowing why I had such a hard time falling asleep. Not wanting to get up in the morning. And then I fell in love. So impractical. So impractical.

I fell into an impractical life. Being in Love type of impractical life. Worst Practices Type of Impractical Life. - Yes, definitely worst practice and did I mention how impractical? So impractical.

I have also seen the end of my life tonight. It was very impractical. Perhaps more impractical than falling in love. The end of my life was that it wasn't there any more. I died. There I was no more. Very impractical way to be, no? So maybe falling in love is much less impractical than being dead. I think I will stick with falling in love. Falling by itself is impractical too. Standing would be more solid, more practical but when you keep on standing the view never changes around you. It's like being dead. So falling in love may be the opposite of being dead, the opposite of standing. Anyway, I was just amusing myself with these impractical notions of putting words together, word after word typed up in a string of letters with spaces. Yes. I did fall in love. So impractical.

Reusable Construction Materials for Humans

2004-01-07T10:15:00.000-05:00

I have already posted a couple of quotes from Joseph Conrad's "Notes on Life and Letters" and having read the volume (online, thanks to Project Gutenberg I would like to quote one more passage if you allow me. This passage sums up for me why I love writers like Joseph Conrad, not only because he was born Polish, like me; not because english is his second language, as is mine; perhaps because in this passage taken from the author's introduction to this volume of scribblings from 1898 to 1920 one can not help but to see a man fully aware of the passing of life, fragile skeleton we all build with our relationships to others, the others' skeletons of life; and then to know that our constructions were only a mere temporary housing for the humanity we only have had glimpses of, and perhaps some of our pieces of construction material and methods shall be used as building blocks for others that will come after us to afford them better glimpses of humanity within themeslves, chance will tell.

"This volume (including these embarrassed introductory remarks) is
as near as I shall ever come to DESHABILLE in public; and perhaps
it will do something to help towards a better vision of the man, if
it gives no more than a partial view of a piece of his back, a
little dusty (after the process of tidying up), a little bowed, and
receding from the world not because of weariness or misanthropy but
for other reasons that cannot be helped: because the leaves fall,
the water flows, the clock ticks with that horrid pitiless
solemnity which you must have observed in the ticking of the hall
clock at home. For reasons like that. Yes! It recedes. And this
was the chance to afford one more view of it--even to my own eyes"

~ get the text at gutenberg.net

Brothers in Arms. Sisters of Avalon. Get to Work.

2004-01-06T17:28:00.000-05:00

"Work is the law. Like iron that lying idle degenerates into a
mass of useless rust, like water that in an unruffled pool sickens
into a stagnant and corrupt state, so without action the spirit of
men turns to a dead thing, loses its force, ceases prompting us to
leave some trace of ourselves on this earth." The sense of the
above lines does not belong to me. It may be found in the note-
books of one of the greatest artists that ever lived, Leonardo da
Vinci. It has a simplicity and a truth which no amount of subtle
comment can destroy.

The Master who had meditated so deeply on the rebirth of arts and
sciences, on the inward beauty of all things,--ships' lines,
women's faces--and on the visible aspects of nature was profoundly
right in his pronouncement on the work that is done on the earth.
From the hard work of men are born the sympathetic consciousness of
a common destiny, the fidelity to right practice which makes great
craftsmen, the sense of right conduct which we may call honour, the
devotion to our calling and the idealism which is not a misty,
winged angel without eyes, but a divine figure of terrestrial
aspect with a clear glance and with its feet resting firmly on the
earth on which it was born.

And work will overcome all evil, except ignorance, which is the
condition of humanity and, like the ambient air, fills the space
between the various sorts and conditions of men, which breeds
hatred, fear, and contempt between the masses of mankind, and puts
on men's lips, on their innocent lips, words that are thoughtless
and vain."

~ Joseph Conrad on Tradition

There is work to be done. An Honourable Tradition. A BadaBing work of Entropy Reversals.

Writing & Blogging

2004-01-04T17:43:00.000-05:00

"Writing is not necessarily something to be ashamed of -- but do it in private, and wash your hands afterwards." -- R. Heinlein

On Action and Voice

2004-01-02T15:28:00.000-05:00

"Action in its essence, the creative art of a writer of fiction may
be compared to rescue work carried out in darkness against cross
gusts of wind swaying the action of a great multitude. It is
rescue work, this snatching of vanishing phases of turbulence,
disguised in fair words, out of the native obscurity into a light
where the struggling forms may be seen, seized upon, endowed with
the only possible form of permanence in this world of relative
values--the permanence of memory. And the multitude feels it
obscurely too; since the demand of the individual to the artist is,
in effect, the cry, "Take me out of myself!" meaning really, out of
my perishable activity into the light of imperishable
consciousness. But everything is relative, and the light of
consciousness is only enduring, merely the most enduring of the
things of this earth, imperishable only as against the short-lived
work of our industrious hands.

When the last aqueduct shall have crumbled to pieces, the last
airship fallen to the ground, the last blade of grass have died
upon a dying earth, man, indomitable by his training in resistance
to misery and pain, shall set this undiminished light of his eyes
against the feeble glow of the sun. The artistic faculty, of which
each of us has a minute grain, may find its voice in some
individual of that last group, gifted with a power of expression
and courageous enough to interpret the ultimate experience of
mankind in terms of his temperament, in terms of art. I do not
mean to say that he would attempt to beguile the last moments of
humanity by an ingenious tale. It would be too much to expect--
from humanity. I doubt the heroism of the hearers. As to the
heroism of the artist, no doubt is necessary. There would be on
his part no heroism. The artist in his calling of interpreter
creates (the clearest form of demonstration) because he must. He
is so much of a voice that, for him, silence is like death; and the
postulate was, that there is a group alive, clustered on his
threshold to watch the last flicker of light on a black sky, to
hear the last word uttered in the stilled workshop of the earth.
It is safe to affirm that, if anybody, it will be the imaginative
man who would be moved to speak on the eve of that day without to-
morrow--whether in austere exhortation or in a phrase of sardonic
comment, who can guess?"

From "HENRY JAMES--AN APPRECIATION--1905" by Joseph Conrad.

The skill of blogging

2003-12-23T12:42:00.000-05:00

"The skill of writing is to create a context in which other people can think."
~ Edwin Schlossberg

The skill of blogging is to create a context in which other people can blog.

Jesus Bunker Messiness at Joho Blog

2003-12-23T12:35:00.000-05:00

"I always like weblogs being a perfect messiness of life unfolding in real time. Love and hate and petty theft and flame wars and civic movements and complaints and love affairs and crying and death and beer drinking. All faces of humanity all at once in real time. Quite overwhelming it seems. That messiness of life. Pretty fucking exciting. I hope we can sustain this messiness for a long time before somebody starts writing dissertations on blogging and what it is and what it all means.
I would vote to keep the messiness going. Let's see some more humanity at play. Some more exploring, endless not-knowing of rediscovery of seemingly well known life lived in real time before somebody writes 'Definitive Guide to Blogging'.
Some think it's anarchy but it's just freedom to have one's voice speak back to us again after it was initially expressed. A chance to step in the same spot in the river one more time and fall in love with the world again. "

Jesus Bunker Notes commenting at Joho the Blog

Keep the Messiness Going!

If value's only measure is Money then we are Fucked as a society

2003-12-22T13:21:00.000-05:00

"(...) I'm 43 years old, I have five children, the youngest son is 10 now. (...) I'm very glad that finally someone has thought about women, who have drudged for many years receiving nothing in return from the state, government. Nobody, in any government, has thought about us, mothers, who dedicated years, twenty in my case, for bringing up children, for family.

You write that a woman at home works from 4 to 9 hours a day. I worked for 17 hours and not always slept nights. You know how it is with infants and small children.

Right now I look for a job but I can't find it anywhere. Either I'm too old or a break (I worked 25 years ago in a glassworks in Poznañ) is too long. I finished vocational school but I didn't have a chance to decide about my life, the decisions were taken for me.

Like they say, I'm in the lurch. I feel useless and without a penny. My husband is the only family's provider. Now there are six of us because my son got married and so did a daughter. It has been very difficult for us. No government has done anything for us, mothers.

I don't know, maybe it would have been better if I left my children without care, for a street to raise them. I would have then years of work and money, though I don't know what would have happened to my children.

I do have a little hope that the foundation will achieve its goal and will help poor Polish mothers. I would like to support you but I feel helpless. (...) "

by El¿bieta, Gniezno

Women Finding Their Voices

2003-12-22T13:15:00.000-05:00

We decided to do something about it. DONE - PAID, we call it. We run a campaign called "WOMEN'S HOUSEWORK - HOW TO REWARD IT?" When we write to politicians we use the same wise words that are used on international conferences. We say that productive and reproductive work must be treated equally. That women working at home should have a right to a pension, somebody should pay a pension contribution for them, think about fixed salary. Think about different taxing for women working both at home and outside it, maybe give them more tax-free income. Everything - considering macroeconomic effects of these actions.

It's hard to talk about it publicly. Our civilisation is based on the myth about Eve being created from Adam's rib. So a woman is a part of a man, is second, is worse. Erich Fromm, who was investigating the prechristian myth about the fall of Mother of Everything - Goddess Tiamat said: "Six thousand years ago patriarchy conquered a woman - society was based on a male domination. Women became man's property and they had to be grateful for every concession made by him" .Our "gratitude" often leads us towards feminism. But still, forced to choose between the left and the right, we can't find our own voice

The right wants to close us at homes, make us always-caring housewives, kissed on a hand and given a faded flower on Mother's Day. The left shouts that we must be active, we must learn and work, work, work - if we want to be free. And we between the two sides - confused, shouted down, uncertain. All we really want is the right to choose. To choose the way we want to live. Do we want to be at home and take care of our family? Do we want a career? Or do we want to connect these two things in a way suitable for each one of us? Politicians should just make sure that economic system doesn't choose instead of us."

by Anna Mieszczanek in Polish magazine for women "Zwierciad³o" ("Mirror"))

Thanks for writing Anna. My sincerest BadaBing to you.

Woman is the nigger of the world. Better scream about it.

2003-12-22T13:06:00.000-05:00

"We make her paint her face and dance
If she won’t be slave, we say that she don’t love us
If she’s real, we say she’s trying to be a man
While putting her down we pretend that she is above us

We make her bear and raise our children
And then we leave her flat for being a fat old mother then
We tell her home is the only place she would be
Then we complain that she’s too unworldly to be our friend

Woman is the nigger of the world...yes she is
If you don’t belive me take a look to the one you’re with
Woman is the slaves of the slaves
Ah yeah...better screem about it"

~ John Lennon

Women's house work - How it should be rewarded?

2003-12-22T12:55:00.000-05:00

"Day by day, no matter we work either out of home or not, we work in house. Not for money.

Our husbands or partners, our children are given that way free of any costs a lot - not only our love and care. They are given also very concrete "goods and services" in the economical terms. All that, what has been delivered from the shop, washed, cooked, cleaned, tidy-managed, planned, working as in efficient enterprise.

That's the rule: When people get something for free, they tend not to treat that seriously. They do not make any value of that. They do not treat this seriously up to the end. They disrespect. Our domestic co-habitants have their ultimate assurance that always, no matter what happen, we will lead our house works, everything what is necessary to do in the house. Sometimes maybe we cry or shout a little.

If we by ourselves start to think and talk about our house job as something what is valuable, after some good time also our families start to think about this that way."

more at "Done-Paid" or Women's Housework campaign

Another Day in the Toiletless Empire

2003-12-19T15:45:00.000-05:00

"The Romans managed to provide sanitation for people thousands of years ago, and yet millions of people today still do not have access to a toilet."

...from "Global trade keeps a billion children in poverty":

Amerikan BadaBing to You, the Toiletless Majority of Planet Earth.

Strong Signal from All Noise All The Time

2003-12-19T12:43:00.000-05:00

Rageboy's Signal : "It is my contention, demonstrated fairly well here I think, that the New Age, of which Steiner is a shining pillar, is not merely fucked in part -- say, due to some of the more weirdball practices it's so easy to make fun of -- but that it is fucked in toto (and your little dog, too!), from the ground up and the sky down. As above so below. And it is my contention, moreover, that narcissism is not merely an unfortunate error on the part of those Seekers a bit too zealous in their lofty pursuit of 'self-knowledge,' but that it is the very goal and grail of all this self-important self-referential self-absorbedly numinous Gnostic Nosferatu-lookalike New Age horse shit."

Stephen Greenblatt on Rabelais and carnival

2003-12-18T17:34:00.000-05:00

Stephen Greenblatt on Rabelais and carnival: "Festive laughter - popular, universal, ambivalent in its triumph and derision, gaiety and degradation - has at its center what Bakhtin calls the 'grotesque body,' ever unfinished, ever creating, ever exceeding its limits in copulation, pregnancy, childbirth, dying, eating, drinking, and defecating. The grotesque body - open to the world in all its orifices, unbounded, abusive, devouring, and nurturing - receives its fullest visual representation in the art of Bosch and Breughel, its most masterful literary expression in Rabelais' Gargantua and Pantagruel. Rabelais's scatology, Bakhtin suggests, must be understood in the context of rituals like the mock mass, in which excrement was used instead of incense, or processions in which the festive clergy, eating boudins, rode in carts loaded with dung and tossed it at the crowd"

Forgotten Miss Sarajevo

2003-12-18T16:50:00.000-05:00

"Here she comes, beauty plays the clown
Here she comes, surreal in her crown "

Miss Sarajevo - by The Passengers:

And the night is set to freeze

Not Cool but Not Wroffle Yet

2003-12-18T16:36:00.000-05:00

"Elvis...with God on his knees
Elvis...owned three TVs
Here come the killer bees Head full of honey potato chips and cheese
Elvis...the bumper stickers
Elvis...the white knickers
Elvis...the white nigger
Ate at king burger and just kept getting bigger

Elvis...sang to win
Elvis...the battle hymn
Elvis...the battle to be slim
Elvis ate America before America ate him"

U2 - Elvis Ate America lyrics:

Not Cool but Not Wroffle Yet

Not Dark Yet. Not Light Yet.

2003-12-17T16:15:00.000-05:00

Bob Dylan: Not Dark Yet

"Well my sense of humanity has gone down the drain
Behind every beautiful thing there's been some kind of pain

I've been down on the bottom of a world full of lies
I ain't looking for nothing in anyone's eyes

I was born here and I'll die here against my will
I know it looks like I'm moving, but I'm standing still"

Not Angst but Not Happiness Yet.
Not Depression but Not Peace Yet.
Not Dark but Not Light Yet.
Not Murder but Not Forgiveness Yet.
Not Animal but Not Human Yet.
Not Mad but Not Crazy Yet
Not Loud but Not Silent Yet
Not Child but Not Adult Yet
Not Jerking Off but Not Fucking Yet
Not Numb but Not Alive Yet
Not Without A Job but Not Employed Yet
Not Alone but Not Lover Yet
Not Tears but Not Laughter Yet
Not Hungry but Not Satified Yet

Not Blogging but Not 404 Yet

And BadaBing to you too motherfuckers!
Hej Koleda, Koleda!!!

10 reasons why investors are illiterate

2003-12-16T12:27:00.000-05:00

Ten reasons investors would rather stay ignorant: "Most of us just don't care to learn
Please face facts, folks: The vast majority of America's investors fit in one of these 10 categories. And legislation certainly won't change things.
I suppose I could be more tactful and politically correct and say Americans are 'teachable' and 'potentially literate,' but that would be pie-in-the-sky wishful-thinking.
It won't happen. It's not that people can't be taught ... it's that they don't want to be taught. Consequently, the vast majority will fall outside the radar of any well-meaning effort to reach them with an 'investor literacy' program. So why waste more of the taxpayers' good money?"

Voices from bmoeasy

2003-11-26T22:55:00.000-05:00

"The Internet - and I am especially thinking here of blogs, a term I hadn't yet run across in the year 2000 - is a network of particulars: of very singular voices. When I read a 'good' blog I hear a sincere voice. I am engaged by the passion or knowledge or rage of that voice. I am persuaded and seduced. I see the words, the text, the style, and I hear a voice.
When I listen to 'good' radio, I hear a voice. I listen to that voice if it is sincere, if the voice is being truthful - even if , no - especially if - the truth is subjective, if the voice has integrity, passion, knowledge - no matter what the subject. I am uplifted. I am persuaded and seduced. I see a face. I feel I have met someone.
I imagine Better Radio to be a place where the object offered up - the voice - is made subject in my mind. I appropriate that voice, much as I would appropriate the voice of a favorite authour, or musician, or blogger. It informs me at worst - which is nevertheless good., It transforms me at best. I see and hear and feel better.
I seek a better world.
-
bmo"

Like a car crash

2003-11-26T21:54:00.000-05:00

"Dressed up like a car crash
Your wheels are turning but you're upside down
You say when he hits you, you don't mind
Because when he hurts you, you feel alive
Hey babe, is that what it is"

U2 Stay (Faraway, So Close!) lyrics:

Stay. Stay.
As an Angel hits the ground.

What a lonely night to be
in the presence of love not lost
and not yet found.

In the jungle of humanity
there is time to find each other
It's not too late

If I could Stay
and I don't have to stop the Time

Stay
Dressed up like a car crash
As an Angel hits the ground
Just a Bang

Rupert?

2003-11-26T18:45:00.000-05:00

Who is Rupert? and what is 'watched Survivor'? is it an Alarm clock? And is it possible that Rupert is in fact the Bada Bing conspiracy agitator who stole the Blue Diamond that Stealthy Steve is now going to recover for Mlle. Beaufort.

The plot thickens.

Blue Diamond stolen by Bada Bing Conspirators

2003-11-26T18:39:00.000-05:00

OnePotMeal: In which Stealthy Steve receives a visitor. Finally a book for us read by Steve. Fire up your MP3s to listen.

Donate to Rupert - the True Survivor

2003-11-26T11:50:00.000-05:00

Rosie and Andrew were shocked by the betrayal on Survivor last week when Rupert was thrown off that they asked me to set up a website for him. Here it is:
Donate to Rupert - the True Survivor
Andrew drew the picture.
He made a t-shirt too.

Feeling Stuck?

2003-11-26T10:24:00.000-05:00

Retirement

2003-11-25T14:26:00.000-05:00

Retirement - to those who give so much of themselves

that asshole Dave Winer

2003-11-18T19:10:00.000-05:00

Google Search: "that asshole Dave Winer"

This is a test post to increase the count on google for the phrase "that asshole Dave Winer".

Had it been a real post it would have had some more interesting theme to it. A sort of a 'linguistic meat' one could attach one's brain to amuse oneself with the blood flow of one's molecules (or whateverthefuck flows in there anyway).

Thank you. As you were. Go on. Move about. Click on something now.

Narcissism. The best thing since the sliced bread.

2003-11-14T22:49:00.000-05:00

"this is narcissism. and it's becoming quite popular, thanks to the ubiquity of New Age rationalizations that pretty much add up to: you can be what you want to be. on cloud 9. when the Temptations sang that, it was about heroin. and it's still about addiction, but to something far darker that hides in plain daylight. psychic vampirism. you won't believe it's real until it gets right up in your face one fine blue day. hope really hard that it never does"

Narcissism. The best thing since the sliced bread. Order one or two for your family. Just in time for Xmas my dear.

Street Fighting Man

2003-11-14T22:18:00.000-05:00

Stand on the Shoulder of Giants? Slaugher The Giants! The Carnival!

Hey! said my name is called disturbance
I’ll shout and scream, I’ll kill the king, I’ll rail at all his servants
Well, what can a poor boy do
Except to sing for a rock ’n’ roll band
’cause in sleepy london town
There’s no place for a street fighting man
No

On the shoulders

2003-11-14T20:27:00.000-05:00

We don't stand on the shoulders of giants. We slaugher them. We burn them. We dance on their skulls. We suck the bone marrow and feed off them and grow ourselves to be giants - some day to be slaughered by future generations. The Carnival of Humanity. Bring your fire. Burn down the Pleasantville. Use your Voice before you turn into ashes and dust. Pooooofff!

The magic of a word - blog

2003-11-14T20:10:00.000-05:00

Fishrush :: A Postbloggerist's Pronunciamento: "The magic of a word - blog - which for journalists and non-journalists alike has opened the door to an unforeseen world, has for us not the slightest importance. "

Less Bullshit! More Peekaboo!

Fishrush :: Welcome!

2003-11-14T20:05:00.000-05:00

Fishrush :: Welcome!: "Since I first entered the public blog roll lists, a very young man indeed, it has been my constant fortune to number amongst my nearest and dearest friends members of the blogging world who have been its grace and pride. They have so dropped from my side one by one that I already, begin to feel like the Spanish monk of whom a few Wikis tell, who had grown to believe that the only realities around him were the pictures which previously loved; that all the moving life witnessed, or ever had seen, was a shadow and a dream."

Fishrush :: System Error Found

2003-11-14T19:59:00.000-05:00

Fishrush :: System Error Found: "HTTP 419 - File not properly blogged because blogger didn't remember to blog correctly "

Fishrush :: Vision

2003-11-10T16:34:00.000-05:00

Fishrush :: Vision: "We are truly not even average, yet from time-to-time we stumble upon truth as a drunk stumbles into a garbage can, but run from it because it frightens us as the dog frightens the cat. "

Cool. I am so happy!

Asshole Exchange Classified Ads

2003-11-09T22:12:00.000-05:00

URGENT: Will exchange an asshole husband for a romantic man who will tell me that I make him happy. Looks not important. Me- starved for attention. Willing to make you happy. Just don't turn into another asshole. Ask for Dorothy when you call.

Bada Bing.

DIY Asshole

2003-11-07T12:31:00.000-05:00

Certificate of Upgrade
to
Complete Asshole

is awarded to

____________________________________

In recognition of your obnoxious attitude, ability to piss people off, complete asinine juvenile behavior and total dedication to personal gain without regard to the many hardships you have forced upon friends, family and other during your lifetime, you have become a legend in your own mind.

To recognize your upgrade from half-assed to complete asshole, gives all concerned great satisfaction. If anyone, for any reason, doubts your status,

JUST BE YOURSELF!

____________________ ____________________ ____________________
Effective Date Signed

Last Things

2003-11-07T10:36:00.000-05:00

Q: What's the last thing that goes through a bug's mind when it hits your windshield at 65mph?

A: Its asshole.

Which Happy Bunny Are You?

2003-11-07T10:28:00.000-05:00

Congratulations. You are the "kiss my asshole" happy bunny.

You don't care about anyone or anything.
You must be so proud!

which happy bunny are you?

joining our assholes together as one...

2003-11-06T00:17:00.000-05:00

so I notice over on the right sidebar there---yeh, right over there---> that you can now change the date and time of your posts to "future post" your writing, blasting pixels through the space/time continuum landing smack dab on new year's eve 2005 (i.e., the last day of 2004).

HOLY SHIT I says to myself, I says.

I think that this makes perfect sense. We must all now begin writing backwards toward one another. We start on the eve of 2005 and write our way back to the present, where we will join ourselves, one another, and perhaps even one another's assholes, since moving through the time/space continuum requires much velocity. Or so I hear.

So fuckit. Skip this new years eve and write your way a year past that, then make a u-turn, and write your asshole right back here.

last one to do a loopty loop is a rotten egg.

Growing Up In Amerika

2003-11-05T13:42:00.000-05:00

Essence

2003-11-05T10:41:00.000-05:00

Telegraph Road

2003-11-04T16:13:00.000-05:00

"But believe in me baby and I’ll take you away
From out of this darkness and into the day
From these rivers of headlights these rivers of rain
From the anger that lives on the streets with these names
’cos I’ve run every red light on memory lane
I’ve seen desperation explode into flames
And I don’t want to see it again. . .

from all of these signs saying sorry but we’re closed
All the way down the telegraph road"

Dire Straits
Lyrics - (Telegraph Road Lyrics)

On Every Street

2003-11-04T16:10:00.000-05:00

"Somewhere your fingerprints remain concrete
And it’s your face I’m looking for on every street"

Dire Straits Lyrics - (On Every Street Lyrics)

On Every Street Baby!

Loss Of Images

2003-11-04T02:17:00.000-05:00

(found via wood s lot) On "The Loss of Images, or Through the Sierra de Gredos": "Handke's retrospective utopia is about loss, however, and the purpose of the journey that this novel describes is not to avert loss, but to make it felt" (...)

"Ordinarily, I start with myself and my own headaches; in the course of my writing, I detach myself from them more and more, and then in the end I ship myself and my headaches off to market as a commodity"

read more on Handke

I touched it

2003-11-01T21:33:00.000-05:00

I didn't think people were so ready to admit that they touched it, too. I touched mine and it didn't work either. but I already knew that.

that's why women feel so safe with me.

kids, boyz, and blogbrothers.

2003-10-31T14:47:00.000-05:00

marek and ken
drinking in a tree
f-a-l-l-i-n-g

first comes blog
then comes booze
then comes marek taking a snooze.

suckin his thumb
wettin his drawers
shopping at them online girly stores.

Jeneane PR work works

2003-10-31T09:45:00.000-05:00

Jeneane, I never coupled with a hard candy wrapper. These are unsubstantiated allegations about my having sex with a candy wrapper, however I will take warm pussy anytime. And I have to go and drink with Ken. He just keeps raising those toasts and don't forget to toss those lotto stubs.

jacket blurbs for the other ones

2003-10-31T09:25:00.000-05:00

for RB

"His journeys into the finer adult video stores, online porn sites, and his penchant for vintage Barbies, coupled with his background in obstetrics and gynocology, uniquely qualify him to bring the benefit of gummy bears to the forefront of our lives today."

and for marek:

"His journeys into the remote suburbs of Dallas, Polish delicatessens, and his obsession with licking other people's temples, coupled with his background in hard candy, uniquely qualify him to bring the benefit of long-lost lotto ticket stubs to the forefront of our lives today."

Band of Brothers

2003-10-30T19:09:00.000-05:00

To you, my brothers, a toast...

Raise your glass to sex, to sweat, to heavy breathing and laughter, to biting, to arched backs and hair. Raise your glass to handcuffs and ice and an open window. To christmas lights, to no lights. To being so good at multitasking. To falling asleep and waking up and going at it again. And again. To not stopping for more than a few minutes to catch your breath. Raise your glass the saying "if there's a will then there's a way."

Drink to that! And when your done with your drink let's go at it again.

Long lost traditions

2003-10-30T19:01:00.000-05:00

RB points us to that asshole Gregg Braden where I find this famouse line. "His journeys into the remote mountain villages, monasteries, and temples of times past, coupled with his background in the hard sciences, uniquely qualify him to bring the benefit of long-lost traditions to the forefront of our lives today" - It is perfect, no? A whiff of mysticism, don't you wish to be that person? Don't you wish to go to those mountain villages? those temples of times past? - A sentence to cause everlasting spiritual orgasm. (YES, thank you, having one right now).

And isn't it an opiate phrase to say "long-lost traditions". Yes, that's the one. Feeling mellow now. Going under. Take all my money. I want all your books.

I hate this thing about RB that he just fucks with my head by pointing to this bullshit. But this bullshit is shaping my community. Fuck. We are so fucked.

sky fell down on her Twin Henhouses

2003-10-30T17:15:00.000-05:00

all noise - all the time: "'Ah, but who will take my meaning,' said Chicken Little as the sky fell down on her Twin Henhouses. 'Not me,' said The Association for Humanistic Psychology, which mailed me Gregg's amazing brochure. 'Not me,' said The Association for Transpersonal Psychology, listed on the flyer as 'in cooperation with' -- where for cooperation read cahoots. 'Not me,' said The Saybrook Graduate School & Research Center (formerly The Humanistic Psychology Institute, a.k.a. Esalen II), which also endorses Braden's barbarous brand of barely intelligible bio-spiritual bullshit. A free sample, you say? Sure, why not"

God Code Q&A with RB

2003-10-30T15:05:00.000-05:00

On God Code and other things...: "Me, I don't think, you know, like, Science Is The Answer. But neither do I think that Spiritual Snake Oil Is The Answer. Both are epistemologically bankrupt stabs in the dark at a body of knowledge we all know was done in long ago, not by Nietzsche as some suppose, but -- get a clue! -- by the butler in the library with the lead pipe. My personal beliefs have not wavered from the credo that supported so many of us through the ominous onomatopoetry of the ontologically omnivorous '60s:

Acid Is The Answer! ...uh... What Was The Question?

more...On God Code and other things...