Happy Holidays

AND

A bullet through the heart

http://www.defensereview.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=875

If you ever wondered about how they collect organic ballistics data on modern firearms, this article is for you. In addition to the bullet wounds and trauma doctors deal with every day, people also test firearms on animals (carcasses?) to observe how their hearts and lungs explode when penetrated by different types of ammunition.

The photos from this one lean a little TOO hard for a normal trip down permalean lane, but I highly recommend you scroll through them on the original page.

yippi yippi yeah

durian fruit

1997 indonesia
ghostface platinum

"A wild durian fruit from the rain forests of Borneo is cut open, its vivid red flesh exposed. Wild durian has a spiny green exterior, emits an infamous rotting stench, and is mainly eaten by birds.

(Photo shot on assignment for, but not published in, "Borneo’s Strangler Fig Trees," April 1997, National Geographic magazine)"

a/the frag grenade

• What is a fragmentation ("frag") grenade?
• What is the blast radius of a frag grenade?
• What does it feel like to experience a frag grenade?
• When a frag grenade detonates, what are its effects on the human body and mind?

Please post your thoughts in the comments.

cringe binge vol. 1

To:"I honestly don't understand why anyone would ever have to cough again."

Re: "that weird spiky sparkly sprankled feeling, that tingly wingly you get real crazy cringy,
meat grinder sandwich, seeing your Paprika in the 100 yd dash, tussin and turnin' with  40 water head and shoulders knees and toes DRANKED OUT
feeling."

things are not so good here since the mayor died. josh has been his usual self, germane, flimsy, and overall too tart. the couches still exist as they once did at the tops of triangle trees but I feel that jamaica has been a fine place for postcard production. there is truly always another next friday to wish upon. 

only One way back

By Rebecca Cusey, Religion News Service

NEW YORK

"C.S. Lewis' Chronicles of Narnia book series is so revered by Christian readers that adapting the books into film becomes a delicate tightrope. Changes risk alienating fans, but what works in the books doesn't always translate well to the big screen"

....

"'The underlying messages are so important, and so vital to the story," says Douglas Gresham, Lewis' stepson and co-producer of the new film.

"Which are the return to faith, truth, justice, honesty, honor, glory, personal commitment, personal responsibility. Also the message (that) no matter how far away we stray, there's only one way back."'

....

'"When you talk about seeing, I think it's more believing," he said. "You believe, and then you see. Aslan represents God. People say, 'If God's there, why can't I see him?' Well, because you're not believing."'

.........................................................

from a wikipedia article on "Literary nonsense:"

"The sentence "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously" was coined by Noam Chomsky as an example of nonsense. The individual words make sense, and are arranged according to proper grammar, yet the result is still nonsense. The inspiration for this attempt at creating verbal nonsense came from the idea of contradiction and irrelevant or immaterial characteristics (an idea may have a dimension of color, yet it is first specified to be without hue), both of which would be sure to make a phrase meaningless. The phrase "the square root of Tuesday" operates on the latter principle. This principle is behind the inscrutability of the koan "What is the sound of one hand clapping?", as one hand would supposedly require another hand to complete the definition of clapping.

Still, the human will to find meaning is strong; green ideas might be ideas associated with a Green party in politics, and colorless green ideas criticises some of them as uninspiring. For some, the human impulse to find meaning in what is actually random or nonsensical is what makes people find luck in coincidence, or believe in omens and divination." [emphasis mine]

delta

The Delta Quadrant is situated between 180 degrees and 270 degrees.

Sarah Kane

A Synopsis

The play is set in an expensive hotel room in Leeds. Ian, a foul-mouthed middle-aged tabloid journalist has brought a young woman, Cate, to the room for the night. Cate is much younger than Ian, and emotionally fragile. Throughout Scene 1, Ian tries to seduce Cate into sleeping with him, but she resists. All the while, Ian proudly parades his misogyny, racism and homophobia. The scene ends with the sound of spring rain.

Scene 2 begins the next morning. Ian has raped Cate during the night. She attacks him and then escapes out of the bathroom window. Then, unexpectedly, a soldier enters the room in full battle dress. Then hotel room is then struck by a mortar bomb, and the scene ends with the sound of summer rain.

In Scene 3, the hotel room is in ruins; the bomb has blasted a whole in the wall. The soldier and Ian begin to talk, and it is gradually revealed that England is in the midst of war. The soldier tells Ian about appalling atrocities that he has witnessed and taken part in, involving rape, torture and genocide, and says he has done everything as an act of revenge for the murder of his girlfriend. He then rapes Ian, and sucks out his eyes. The scene ends with the sound of autumn rain.

In Scene 4, Ian lies blinded next to the soldier, who has committed suicide. Cate returns, describing the city being overrun by soldiers, and bringing with her a baby that she has rescued. The baby is dead, however, so she buries it in a hole in the floorboards and leaves.

Scene 5 consists of a series of brief images, showing Ian crying, masturbating and even hugging the dead soldier for comfort as he starves in the ruined room. Eventually, he crawls into the hole with the dead baby and eats it. The stage direction then reads that Ian dies. It starts raining, and Ian says "Shit". Cate returns, bringing a sausage that she has paid for by having sex with a soldier.





Her last play, 4.48 Psychosis, was completed shortly before she died and was performed in 2000, at the Royal Court, directed by James Macdonald. This, Kane's shortest and most fragmented theatrical work, dispenses with plot and character, and no indication is given as to how many actors were intended to voice the play (in Macdonald's production, two women and one man performed the work). Written at a time when Kane was suffering from severe depression, it has been described by her fellow-playwright and friend David Greig as having as its subject the "psychotic mind."

The play is written from the point of view of someone with severe clinical depression. A repeated motif in the play is "serial sevens": counting down from one hundred by sevens, a bedside test often used by psychiatrists to test for loss of concentration or memory. According to her friend and fellow-playwright David Greig, the title of the play derives from the time -- 4.48 am -- when Kane, in her depressed state often woke. Greig considered the play to be 'perhaps uniquely painful in that it appears to have been written in the almost certain knowledge that it would be performed posthumously.' Some critics have had difficulty in distinguishing the play from the reality of Kane's life. Michael Billington of The Guardian newspaper asked, "How do you review a 75-minute suicide note?"

Des Esseintes on Genre

"Of all forms of literature that of the prose poem was Des Esseintes' chosen favorite. Handled by an alchemist of genius, it should, according to him, store up in its small compass, like an extract of meat, so to say, the essence of the novel, while suppressing its long, tedious analytical passages and superfluous descriptions. Again and again Des Esseintes had pondered the distracting problem, how to write a novel concentrated in a few sentences, but which should yet contain the cohobated juice of the hundreds of pages always taken up in describing the setting, sketching the characters, gathering together the necessary incidental observations and minor details. In that case, so inevitable and unalterable would be the words selected that they must take the place of all others; in so ingenious and masterly a fashion would each adjective be chosen that it could not with any justice be robbed of its right to be there, and would open up such wide perspectives as would set the reader dreaming for weeks together of its meaning, at once precise and manifold, and enable him to know the present, reconstruct the past, divine the future of the spiritual history of the characters, all revealed by the flash-light of this single epithet."

Cohobate \Co`ho*bate\, v. t. [imp. & p. p. Cohobated; p. pr. &
vb. n. Cohobating.] [LL. cohobare; prob. of Arabic origin:
cf. F. cohober.] (Anc. Chem.)
To repeat the distillation of, pouring the liquor back upon
the matter remaining in the vessel. --Arbuthnot.
[1913 Webster]

For your enjoyment

Please enjoy this.

Des Esseintes on Baudelaire

"But Baudelaire had gone further; he had descended to the bottom of the inexhaustible mine, had pushed his way along abandoned or unexplored galleries, had penetrated those districts of the soul where the monstrous vegetations of the sick mind flourish.

There, near the confines where aberrations of the intellect and diseases of the will sojourn, - the mystic tetanus, the burning fever of wantonness, the typhoids and yellow fevers of crime, he had found, hatching in the gloomy forcing-house of ennui, the appalling reaction of age on the feelings and ideas.

He had revealed the morbid psychology of the mind that has reached the October of its sensations, detailed the symptoms of souls challenged by grief, set apart by spleen; had demonstrated the ever encroaching caries of the impressions at a time when the enthusiasms and beliefs of youth are faded; when there remains only the barren memory of miseries endured, of tyrannies suffered, of vexations undergone, in intelligences crushed by an incongruous fortune.

Happy Mother's Day

A brief glimpse of lean in the early seconds of this conversation on Meet The Press:



Did Dodd's comment signal a departure so drastic that Russert was unable to avoid becoming momentarily bent, askew, jarred, to the point of silence, eyes adjusting to the parallax? Was the effect intentional? subliminal? Where, indeed, can we locate the meaning of motherhood within this exchange? What is at stake when Russert simply chooses to turn his eyes downward, towards the material comfort of his papers?

The other 6 minutes 45 seconds with Dodd (on Obama) are also interesting, while the rest of the show (scroll down at video.msnbc.com) features a severely
leaned Terry Mcauliffe struggling to compensate for the Clinton campaign's most recent (and ongoing) disasters, during which Russert seems to shed stunned moments of silence for hardball political journalism.

I deserve credit

"Josef Fritzl, the Austrian man who fathered seven children with his daughter while keeping her imprisoned in his cellar, has complained of receiving a bad press and not being given credit for keeping his dungeon family alive for more than two decades."




"Fritzl, 73, claimed that media coverage was “unfair” and “entirely one-dimensional”, given the fact that he did not kill his daughter and the children he produced with her during 24 years of sexual abuse in a subterranean bunker in Amstetten."

A Better Tomorrow

A different kind of homework for Singapore students: get a date

"The courses are an extension of government matchmaking programs that try to address the twin challenges embodied in a falling birthrate: too few people are having babies, and too few of those who are belong to what Singapore considers the genetically desirable educated elite.

Over the past 25 years, the mating rituals organized by the government — tea dances, wine tastings, cooking classes, cruises, screenings of romantic movies — have been among the country's least successful social engineering programs."

Marriage & War

THE soldier, Ms. Rheem said, is trained to endure extremes. When it comes to problems in the marriage, “He is saying, ‘We are not really at the worst-case scenario,’ ” Ms. Rheem said. “For the spouse, it is like: ‘Yes, we are. To you, it is a small thing, because it is not life, or death, or bleeding. But if we don’t talk about these things now, it may feel like we are bleeding. I’m bleeding.’ ”

Alan Watts

"What is the essential difference between the world of nature and the world of man?"

"[Nature's] aesthetic forms somehow appeal more to me than the forms that man has created."

What about the case of the Highlands? Is manicured nature some combination of both elements? Does human engineering in the form of gardening and organization enhance the aesthetic beauty that Watts mentions? Or do human attempts to engineer nature simply obscure natural beauty?

Meme

Today I heard someone talking about a new online catchphrase thing. He couldn't quite describe it. Can you describe it? Here are some examples that have been around for awhile. They are called memes. Here, thanks to wiki:

Examples of memes


* Children's culture: games, activities and chants (such as taunts) typical for different age-groups.
* Epic poems: once important memes for preserving oral history; writing has largely superseded their oral transmission.
* Conspiracy theories
* Factoids
* Recipes
* Fashions
* Medical and safety advice: "Don't swim for an hour after eating" or "Steer in the direction of a skid".
* Religions: complex memes, including folk religious beliefs, such as The Prayer of Jabez.
* Popular concepts: these include Freedom, Justice, Ownership, Open Source, Egoism, or Altruism
* Group-based biases: everything from anti-semitism and racism to cargo cults.
* Longstanding political memes such as "mob rule", national identity, Yes Minister and "republic, not a democracy".
* Programming paradigms: from structured programming and object-oriented programming to extreme programming.
* Internet phenomena: Internet slang. "Internet memes" propagate quickly among users using email, websites, blogs, discussion boards and other Internet communications as a medium.
* Moore's Law: this meme has a particularly interesting form of self-replication. The conviction that "semiconductor complexity doubles every 18 months" became considerably more than a predictive observation; it became a performance-target for an entire industry once that industry extensively started to believe in the "law". Manufacturers now strive to make the next generation of semiconductor technology re-create the growth in performance of the previous generation, and so maintain belief in Moore's Law. Additionally, the evolution of this meme provides details of interest. The original law described growth in terms of the number of transistors on a chip, but people - more and more -- have (wrongly) understood it as describing an increase in terms of performance. This could exemplify how a meme can mutate slowly under the pressure of its environment (partial technical understanding and simplification for use in the mainstream media).
* Metameme: The concept of memes itself comprises a meme.
* Anecdotes: Short jokes or other stories.
* Phrases; A turn of phrase, or expression, like "Whasssssup!" or "Where's the beef?" or the Internet meme "all your base are belong to us!"
* Viral marketing: A type of marketing based on memes and using "word of mouth" to advertise (see the recent example of Snakes on a Plane).
* Chain-letters

Does the concept of memes lend credit to constructionist arguments of international relations? Are memes actively or passively defined? By whom are they defined and propagated?

The National Security Archive maintained at GW University is a fun place to visit. Take a stroll down memory lane - Rwandan genocide, reports of nuclear development in Taiwan and Israel in the 1970s, and other fun facts straight from the front lines and recently declassified.

A Land Before Time

Ah, the amazing Ngorongoro Conservation Area. Think of the DNA combinations of all the life that has felt the breeze while standing in that crater.

The area is also home to the Olduvai Gorge: the "cradle of mankind," which is one of the greatest excavation sites for early hominids.

A true "land before time."

"The Ngorongoro Crater is the remains of a once massive volcano, nearly three million years old, on the eastern border of the Serengeti National Park. Now collapsed and eroded to leave the world's largest unbroken caldera, it forms an extraordinarily fertile ‘bowl’ in the midst of rolling highlands, with permanent water sources and steep sides ensuring that the wildlife that thrives here has little reason to leave."

first up

Here is a perfect case study. Have you had a similar experience? Is the man physically, mentally, and spiritually transported into his daydream? What remains behind? How does he come back, and is he in one piece?

welcome

Time. Space. Distortions and threads, stretching from one origin to multiple endpoints. Where is history? Who is time? How did we find society? These are some of the questions this blog will explore. Posted items are singular but ultimately interwoven pieces of the larger, multidimensional jigsaw puzzle that these questions present.

The idea of "lean," as I see it, is this. Lean is an verb. Anything can lean. You or I may find ourselves "leaned," from time to time.

That stop sign on your morning walk may someday strike you in a particular way - does it seem to lean?

Lean is both affiliated with and disassociated from the idea of some geometric distance from 0 degrees. Being physically leaned over to one side is not a prerequisite to experience leaning in the sense that i use it. Items such as the sign may not be physically leaned, but believe me, that stop sign on Latin Way, on particular times in the morning, in a particular light, I do find it to lean quite hard.