the demonized seed
Great L.A. Times feature on industrial hemp.
originally posted by xowie
Great L.A. Times feature on industrial hemp.
originally posted by xowie
Another time, we were together at a rave in San Francisco and when one of the kids there asked me who he was, I told her that he was Timothy Leary. Word spread fast. Spalding came over looking alarmed and said, "They think I'm Timothy Leary for some reason. What should I do?" "Don't disappoint them," I advised. And he didn't. He spent the rest of the night answering their questions with marvelously oblique answers that Tim would have loved.
originally posted by xowie
I kick it back with a cordless mouse, and thus like the idea of this “mouseboard,” although it doesn’t work terribly well in practice. As it turns out, Windows XP already includes an effective on-screen keyboard. I’m sure OSX has a similar feature, right, gentlemen?
originally posted by xowie
‘The glaciers are melting, the glaciers are melting!’ yelled artist Leo Limón of the L.A. River Cats Project good-naturedly. ‘Get a hybrid! Get some rims on it! A big stereo!’ But the dads in Dockers with well-fed children and pregnant wives could not be persuaded to contemplate torn-up wildlife habitats, toxin-choked air and children with missing limbs. They were here to revel in the glory of cars.
originally posted by xowie
To Major-Label Hell and Back by Alison M. Rosen
originally posted by xowie
Mark Frauenfelder: “My six-year-old daughter is on the CAPPS (Computer Assisted Passenger Pre-Screening) list as a security risk.”
"Two Wongs don't make a Wright." No, that's not a typo. It's the punchline in an upcoming installment of the comic strip "BC" by Johnny Hart, referring to two Asian characters who fail in their attempt to build a working airplane — a play on words about the first flight of the Wright brothers. Unfunny, stupid, and offensive. A few papers have already decided to not to run it: Two newspapers substitute "B.C." comic strip. It's a lame, cheap pun, at the expense of Asians. AND TOTALLY UNORIGINAL, lifted from a freakin' t-shirt. Been there, done that, with Abercrombie. That's racist!
Speaking of racist Johnny, I'd be interested to see when the ants first appeared in B.C. I can't imagine it's a coincidence that all these jokes with ants are about underperforming public schools. The ant world is a whole separate society generally invisible to the white characters in the strip.
Carl, the first of their children to live past infancy, born on July 26, 1875, in the small town of Kesswil, Switzerland, was an introverted, solitary boy who, in keeping with family tradition, had dual personalities (''a clumsy, awkward, mathematical dunce of a boy living in real time at the end of the 19th century'' and ''an old man living in the 18th century who dressed in high-buckled shoes, wore a powdered wig and drove a fine carriage'') and mystical visions, including one of God dropping excrement on a cathedral.
originally posted by xowie
It's always recognisable, 17 years later. Brooklyn has such a recalcitrance... it wants to be renovated or gentrified, and it tries and tries again, and those changes are enormous, but at the same time there's some deep resistance. The place is so eccentrically and paradoxically itself that it can't ever be completely overturned. So when I walk around here, in my eyes I can see 1972 and 1975, you know, lying around in chunks, where it was left.
Telegraph.co.uk: Brooklyn boy Jonathan Lethem.
His name was Kenneth Howard, and he was born in 1929, the year the stock market crashed. He was the son of the sign painter who is said to have created the Western Exterminator logo that shows a man in sunglasses, top hat and frock coat, bent over with his finger wagging, as if to reason with the rodent at his feet. Behind his back he holds a huge mallet, should reason fail. According to art and pop culture authority Craig Stecyk, Kenneth inherited his dad’s sign-painting box and talent. He was painting and lettering professionally by age 10, gave birth to the flying eyeball—and earned his famous nickname for being "as stubborn as a Dutchman."
originally posted by xowie
It's been said that this year's "Worst. Macworld. Ever." was really about GarageBand, and I agree, although personally I'm most pleased that iPhoto will finally be able to handle my photos as one library rather than seven. The only reason I'll continue using iPhoto Library Manager will be to sequester certain photos from those intended for a general audience.
But George McGovern was right by James Carroll.
originally posted by xowie
The nucleus of Comet Wild 2. w00t! Stardust.
originally posted by xowie
Many, many hundreds of those stars which you could look up and see with the naked eye, most of which are actually very close, would potentially have terrestrial planets similar to the earth and Mars and Venus.
MarsDaily: Australian astronomers identify possible cradle of alien life.
We landed a rover on Mars twenty-five minutes ago; MetaFilter has some good links.
Musicians from a few different punk-related genres are exploring therapy rock: the up-and-coming "emo" genre, which features hyperdramatic, almost mawkish rock delving deeply into personal upheaval; rap-metal, an aggressive hybrid that has lately turned more introspective; and pop-punk, a slick version of punk that's deceptively up-tempo and not generally noted for its profundity. But it is bands in the last category — like the hugely popular Good Charlotte, Sum 41 and Blink-182 — whose songs most often amount to vivid case studies in adolescent mental health issues. The group A Simple Plan, who are also receiving heavy play on MTV, might have expressed pop-punk's attitude most directly: "I'm just a kid/ And life is a nightmare."
originally posted by xowie
Joe Sacco interview and a lot a other cool stuff in LAW’s Comics Issue.
originally posted by daiichi
OUT: Trucker Hats
IN: Intellectualizing The Trucker Hat Dilemma
Washington Post: THE LIST: What's Out and In for 2004?
Today's scientists seeking to combine quantum mechanics with Einstein's theory of gravity (the general theory of relativity) are convinced that we are on the verge of another major upheaval, one that will pinpoint the more elemental concepts from which time and space emerge. Many believe this will involve a radically new formulation of natural law in which scientists will be compelled to trade the space-time matrix within which they have worked for centuries for a more basic "realm" that is itself devoid of time and space.
For decades, I've struggled to bring my experience closer to my understanding. In my everyday routines, I delight in what I know is the individual's power, however imperceptible, to affect time's passage. In my mind's eye, I often conjure a kaleidoscopic image of time in which, with every step, I further fracture Newton's pristine and uniform conception. And in moments of loss I've taken comfort from the knowledge that all events exist eternally in the expanse of space and time, with the partition into past, present and future being a useful but subjective organization.
The Elegant Universe author Brian Greene in The New York Times: The Time We Thought We Knew.
The Voynich Manuscript mystery has been solved by a UK computer scientist. via /.
originally posted by xowie
Danceteria flyers and Zoë Tamerlis shrine at lundissimo.info.
originally posted by xowie
The following links (from today’s NYT) are dangerously unstable and might EXPIRE AT ANY MINUTE! Read them NOW!!!
originally posted by daiichi
Two things I learned from this article: Nancy's Yogurt is run by Ken Kesey's brother and sister-in-law, and Stonyfield Farm is 40% owned by Dannon Yogurt's parent company.
The Seattle Times: Business & Technology: Nancy's Yogurt, organic Oregon dairy hits it big.
Interesting, sad story about the demise of long-time publisher Creative Arts Books, and the screwing of their authors/co-publishers on the way down.
originally posted by xowie
It was Rumsfeld and Shultz who told Hussein and his emissaries that U.S. statements generally condemning the use of chemical weapons would not interfere with relations between secular Iraq and the Reagan administration, which took Iraq off the terrorist-nations list and embraced Hussein as a bulwark against fundamentalist Iran. Ironically, the U.S supported Iraq when it possessed and used weapons of mass destruction and invaded it when it didn't.
originally posted by xowie
