randomWalks

Gotta remember Teaser anticorporate media and resources.

Romans did not consider male genitalia obscene or pornographic, or even particularly arousing. Instead, erect penises were regarded as a good-luck charm. Painted or sculpted, they stood in every part of the town, and measured all possible lengths, from four feet downwards. They appeared on shops, factories and taverns, above the doors of houses, on statues adorning fountains, gardens and private houses, on lamps, tripods, necklaces, bracelets. Several comic depictions show men - and, on occasion, gods - with grotesquely enlarged penises. In one case, a gladiator is pictured in apparent mortal combat with his own penis.

“I can remember waking up one morning in my native Manhattan, all ready to go out and roast a pig’s tail over an open fire, just the way the Ingalls family did. It seemed only natural. More than anything, I longed to see someone construct a log cabin by hand.” Melanie Rehak loved to read as a child.

<img src=“http://www.sitesalon.co.uk/NewFiles/ghettoja.jpg" align=“right” width=“64” height=“96” / hspace=“12”>Now showing at the sitesalon gallery: “four hundred weddings and an erection showcases a small sample of the millions of photos which lie uncollected in the backrooms of chemist shops and developing labs."

According to CNN, some episodes of Iron Chef were taped in New York recently pitting Food Network stars against the Iron Chefs themselves. I would love to see Chin Kenichi kick Sarah Moulton’s ass, and then looked shocked when he won. The best battle, of course, would be Emeril Lagasse vs. Morimoto Masaharu. BAM! I doubt that’s gonna happen, though. The news on IronChef.com suggests that only one such episode was taped, which will air on June 26th. I can’t wait! thanks, rc3.org.

While New York’s high tech industry has all sorts of magazines and mailing lists devoted to it, the only thing I can find for the DC area is a column in the Post.

There’s a great Ask Slashdot discussion going on about computer companies and social responsibility. If you can cut through the “free” market rhetoric you’ll find some great info, such as this post with the news that the plastics used in Apple’s iMac carry some health & environmental risks.

I’ve never been given a definition of gentrification I was satisfied with, so I’m always working on my own. If you asked me today, I’d say gentrification is when white people occupy a poor neighborhood and drive out residents by increasing costs of housing & goods, such as is happening in the Shaw, Anacostia, LeDroit Park, and Columbia Heights neighborhoods in Washington DC, in Harlem, in San Franciso’s Mission District.

This is certainly a problem in my neighborhood, and a local community organization has come up with a creative approach to the problem – they’ve established a so-called displacement-free zone within which they plan to strategically defend low-income residents against being forced out of the neighborhood.

The day in photos – check back tomorrow for today’s pics.

“On April 12, 1961, Soviet Major Yuri Gagarin, aboard the Vostok I became the first human to travel into space.” What else happened today? How about in Asian history? Radical history? Black history? Rock and roll history?

I’m excited about Upski’s appearance at ABC No Rio this Thursday. I wonder if I’ll also be able to make it a week from Friday when “classically trained composer Evan Hause will perform the entire double LP, KISS Alive! (1975), on solo electric guitar and voice, accompanied by a moderate amount of critical commentary and musical analysis.”

Infolets is blogging “Internet innovations,” which turns out to be a bunch of interesting and useful stuff.

Standing in the middle of a six-lane street with his arms spread, Miremont somehow managed to convince three lanes of traffic to stop, while coercing another crew member to stop the opposing three. The shut-down was mounted five times over a two-hour period, and Meza, used to getting stopped by LAPD on an irregular basis, was sure he would go to jail that day. But with all the blessings heaven could spare, a patrol car never even cruised by, not even when traffic was flowing smoothly. With traffic stopped, Ron (Garcia, who played Leonard) would drive out onto Colorado, speed through a red light into the intersection for certain shots, or come to a complete stop in front of a green light...Why no one called the police is a mystery.

I’m fascinated by the situation in Zimbabwe but the BBC’s coverage somehow leaves me cold. Perhaps that’s because British colonialism is at the root of the land ownership disputes today between a minority of wealthy white farmers and the government.

On the way back to New York, looking out the bus window, I saw two things I’d never noticed before. The first thing gave me a chill as we reached the top of the Delaware Memorial Bridge. An unmistakable nuclear cooling tower sat on the horizon looking like a cartoon. It seemed impossibly huge and far away, though it was probably quite close. This might have been the Hope Creek plant, or maybe Salem (pictured). I almost wish I hadn’t seen it. The second thing I almost missed as we crossed a bridge over a small creek on New Jersey Turnpike. I stared for a moment before I realized what it was – an old brown riverboat, intact but bare as a skeleton and lying at an unnatural tilt – and in that moment it was gone.

When a white woman in Harlem doesn’t know what the term “police brutality” means, that’s white privilege.

When Black women are strip-searched twice as often as white men and women, that’s institutional racism.

I wonder what the trial of the Chicago Seven would have looked like on Court TV.

Aurorae were seen as far south as North Carolina in the U.S. last night, due to an intense geomagnetic storm. There’s a chance they’ll be happening tonight too, so if you’ve got clear skies and relatively little light pollution, go outside when it gets dark and look towards your nearest pole.

disinformation has compiled a dossier on Terence McKenna.

Ain’t-it-cool says a Prisoner movie is in the works, and here are some sure-fire ways to fuck it up. Be seeing you!

Camera Works, a new feature of washingtonpost.com, offers a smart combination of photos, flash presentations, and streaming video in an attempt at ‘new forms of storytelling … merging the best of print journalism, photojournalism and documentary filmmaking with the interactive properties of the World Wide Web.’

Apple is hosting the first trailer for the upcoming Lord of the Rings movies.

"I hope this doesn't insult current LSD fans, but the last time I did it, it seemed like a Sopwith camel or something. We were airborne, and below us were the green fields of France, but you could hear the air shrieking over the control surfaces and feel the wind blasting your face. What I had become used to was the cockpit of the space shuttle. Yes, LSD is a psychedelic drug. But it's a psychedelic drug in the same way a fruit fly can fly."

A Letter of Apology to Elian Gonzalez from Michael Moore. This is the first thing I’ve seen about this situation which even begins to make sense.