Hold that Thought!

I have some Sneaky Feelings or some other 80s bands like Psychic TV or Simple Minds or Ultravox or Wall of Voodoo or ... that we are all brainwashed. I mean that in the “How can you have any pudding...”* kind of way.

[very incomplete]

*I.

Daddy’s flown across the ocean
Leaving just a memory
A snapshot in the family album
Daddy, what else did you leave for me
Daddy, wha’dya leave behind for me
All in all it was just a brick in the wall
All in all it was all just bricks in the wall

The Happiest Days of Our Lives
You, yes you, stand still, laddie

When we grew up and went to school
There were certain teachers
Who would hurt the children in any way they could
By pouring their derision
Upon anything we did
Exposing every weakness
However carefully hidden by the kids

But in the town it was well known
When they got home at night
Their fat and psychopathic wives would thrash them
Within inches of their lives

Ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh

II.

We don’t need no education
We don’t need no thought control
No dark sarcasm in the classroom
Teacher, leave those kids alone
Hey, teacher, leave those kids alone
All in all, it’s just another brick in the wall
All in all, you’re just another brick in the wall

We don’t need no education
We don’t need no thought control
No dark sarcasm in the classroom
Teachers, leave those kids alone
Hey, teacher, leave those kids alone
All in all, you’re just another brick in the wall
All in all, you’re just another brick in the wall

III.

I don’t need no arms around me
And I don't need no drugs to calm me
I have seen the writing on the wall
Don’t think I need anything at all
No, don’t think I need anything at all
All in all, it was all just bricks in the wall
All in all, you were all just bricks in the wall

“Time to go.”
“Wrong do it again!”
“If you don't eat your meat, you can't have any pudding, how can you have any pudding if you don't eat your meat!”
“You! Yes, you! behind the bikesheds, stand still laddie!”

—Pink Floyd, “Another Brick in the Wall” (The Wall)

I Have a Splitting Headache.

He was in two minds about something. In South Park, who exactly is Mr. Hat? Who does he stand in for? Sex (not Mr. Hat; I’ve moved on). Chef likes to sing about the sweet lovin’, but when Kathie Lee wants more, Chef says, ... “I just gave you some 5 minutes ago, are you trying to kill me?” But, it’s nice to be close. Somehow buried her(e), perhaps 10cm deep, which is kind of embarrassing I can only but imagine, is a notion that promiscuity has a purpose, sex can be completely impersonal, but it has to be acted personally. Because, don’t males drowse off into a pleasant state (do they Peter? No, you have parvors and you have to be kept awake? What kind of a person of Slavic—timid perhaps—descent are you?! I’m actually pretty much Anglo).

In that way, my headache lasted between three and four years, the doctors are unsure, rather than the usual few months for my stress condition. At one point “they” said, it’s too late.

Never.

I will put up suggestions on how to deal with the issues raised on South Park, of which there are vary many. By the way, this headache thing is really a projection of the the very first episode, 01x01, which involves Cartman getting an anal probe. Next time I will go into a deeper analysis of the show. It’s more than “I think I learned something today,” though such a straightforward sentiment is useful for pointing certain people in the right direction.

I hope, just because I write these lame-o commentaries, I am not mistaken for one such person. On Labor Day I wear muted tones with my single red item of clothing—the latter being a tradition.

Above is I have idea, and below is... try to figure out what it says.

When do you decide when enough is enough? You have too know first that there is something of which there can be enough. I have a very pretty and nice smelling boxset of 33 1/3 singles and a CD-ROM called A Box Full of Ghosts. The 7”s are by TV Pow/Liminal, Kazumoto Endo/Incapacitants, and Christian Marclay/Otomo Yoshihide; and the CD-ROM with videos from Otomo Yoshihide, Melt Banana, Xome, TV Pow, Liminal, Flexible Products. It was a 42nd birthday present to Peter from a pretty amazing guy. I’m still wondering about, well, (Peter here) I made a piece in January 2003, which was an especially snowy/icy winter, the worst we had had in New England for quite some time. The streets were long mirrors with white dashes visible down them. Pretty clean though. The piece had two versions, and I combined them (mainly because in the first version, my parents called me, and I forgot I was recording a live filtering performance, and there is a five minute blank in it; I liked it but people didn’t—from which we can conclude I am not “people,’ well, perhaps plural).

The second version had some contorted title, something like “Song For Wh*” meaning whom, what, when, where, etc. The first version is called Repeat Love Offence. (I gave it the English spelling. It looks kind of weird, so I think I’ll change it.) The first version is called Repeat Love Offense. Nothing really having to do with apparent offenses, more demands made on people, males. I have felt manipulated, used, abused (but not quite body-raped, though I would say mind-raped), sexually. That’s all. At least I don’t carry my seminal fluid in my neck, because I imagine I’d end up having my head bitten off. Oh, perhaps I’d like to be a Preying Mantis, because I don’t like my head.

Meet wonderful ex-girlfriend (who’s name starts with A). I have had two girlfriends named Andrea (okay, we’ve each had one). This is the London one, a really wonderful person. Alive, and kicking organ pedals in some of the best churches in England. She’s an organ virtuoso. The other sadly is terminally ill; I suppose chronically and acutely ill would have applied too. Unfortunately she is not in the same city anymore, and keeps to herself. We all respond to these things differently. But I feel as if a little prayer of hers sits within me, in my thoughts. That might be premature, and a little religious, but, there you go. Your world view has to change when your world actuality changes. But that doesn’t mean you have to like it. (It seems as if someone has photoshopped her to look a little different, but I’m used to that crap. She still look mighty fine to me.)

In December 2009, I made a piece, simply piling in some quite violent/teleological (path-seeking or -finding) sounds on top of a techno piece, “Louder” (original mix) by Jose Amnesia ft. Jennifer Rene. I called it, without putting too much thought into it, but it seemed to fit well, and now more than ever the music glove fits the brain hand (and oh how it likes to wave or waver or waive or or or), “LongMeasureInsideYourHeadJob.” However pertinent a title such as that can be—and I’d say, very Englishly, “quite”—I do not know what possessed me to call it that. It’s one word, as if the title is not fully formed, an incomplete joining of ideas such that things have got their stickiness all wrong. They need to think Lotus Effect of Beta Waves as the Heart Pulses and I Dream with Much Fear. But I am fear. The rest of my name (A here) will be explained, because there’s a whole story folded or wrapped up in it. But different. As with Apple (in my eye), Think Different. An interior monolog can.

I Need More Than an Art Studio, I Need Photoshop.

Here are photos of Peter surrounded by his art. Next time he’ll be surrounded by me, and I’ll post those pictures, or just post a link to Met Art because that’s how hot I am. These are the first photos of him with his art that have been published internationally and I imagine millions of people are looking at him thinking, yeah, what a dickhead.

Marker pen and very nice paper:-

One side of the living room which is almost the dying room as we use inks and dyes, and also because the xylene and acetone in the fixatives/finishes/ spray paint are pretty atmospherically turning our heads into whether balloons: do we open the windows?

And in the bathroom, a crooked plexiglass number. It’s hard to know where the hyp-hen falls: -iglass, -glass, -lass, -ass. For some fformer ffriends, no doubt -ss. In New Zealand, godzone, we can plexiglass perspex. Much cleverer. Like perspicacious.

He is very conscious of how the close-ups distort his face. What a vain little prick (not gematriacly-speaking).

van der Waal Forces are So Passé.

As mentioned below, the person who has all-but vanished—there are ways to lose weight that are quite severe—due to the friend-antifriend combination, though a neutrino was released along with an anti-electron. Which is significant because he works with semiconductors, for sure, on transneural electronics (which baffle me), but he also works with what transistors used to be and what relays became. Kind of sucked it out of history, deflecting cold war woes.

One dark and stormy knight, for he is chivalrous, and has the title CRMJ (don’t ask, but I think it means he used to load my old dioder (it was IKEA?)’s pF—which could mean soft→LOUD—capacitor with his charge)—it’s an easy LED thing that flashes or changes colors in two modes—surreptitiously, cycling perhaps like on the Tour de France; or just blatantly as is a bicycle at a velodrome doing the sprint: sometimes extreme spurts of speed, sometimes stays in the same place, apparently teetering (on my birthday, of all times, got the electrical stitch/glitch), until the other guy comes up from behind, then k’boom, races to the finish line ready for the next race (though she is ffairly picky)—we loved our dioders. Or you could convince the critter—we had eight, one for each day of the week—to stay on one color—it seemed to me it was stuck on a very nice color for a few years even (was it faulty, or FAVLTY—For A Very Long Time, or at fault?). But how wrong I was—IKEA, as much as possible, is not BO Concept (though Finnish or Icelandic spring to mind too, design being what it is).

Anyway, this knight of rare and wonderful devices, such as a giant antenna (in slenderness and ability to receive waves and rumor or murmur has it, transmit, i.e., across a glove), and a Wall of Voodoo (with its cover of Ring of Fire). He told me on a night of quite forceful snow that his father was a non-teaching professor of theoretical physics who was invited to head a lab in his new country of residence—he is from country A, was schooled in country B, and finished his secondary education in country C, whose language become his primary language, and then tertiary education in this country, which has now kindly made space for him—with an unlimited budget. And that he really need didn’t such a high budget as most of the technology he needed was already there, and he needed only around ten research assistants.

The person relayed his father’s work: on neutron stars. No, he didn’t actually land on a neutron star and try to breath in its atmosphere. Such stars are tiny, and are almost black holes as they have collapsed so densely. And according to some, they have no atmosphere. But this person said they have a tiny atmosphere, his father discovered, just 10cm deep, and upon probing that atmosphere, discovered the never-heard of physical model of fundamental particles of the plasma ephemorally bonding by magnetic field, kind of a single pulse which is how long the bond lasted. Something about spin states, but what isn’t; what isn’t about putting a spin on things. Or some kind of unbelievable state. Anyway, this is not electrostatic attraction as is the case with fundamental particle physics as we know it; but it doesn’t actually contradict our model or/of reality, so there is no collision of sub-universes which would then wipe each other out. They cohabit space.

My ex-girlfriend used to explain mad sirence to me, as we called it, and person saw a diagram of the hybrid primary orbitals of a water molecule she had drawn in a Spanish town, which was to show how the electrons were not “bound” to a particular hydrogen atom, nor were they in fact really upset at the idea of getting their little selves around the big oxygen atom. So hydrogen bonds could be drawn. And also the very weak van der Waal forces—she drew a lot of δ-s and δ+s. What do you know, here it is!

He said the water molecule would be described as—and I forget the details, I bet β and σ quarks were significant—h+ h++ 4 O -- - or something—just like blood types, and the categories were the same: circulating or spilling/flowing out. I said WOW!—it was so amazing. And he wrote the 1000 line Fortran code—they say 1 line is too many, and 1000 not enough—to solve partial differential equations for the theoretical model for his father, and had been doing so since he was a teenager.

Both amazing and amazingly fascinating and lying somewhere between amazing and insanely amazing. I shan’t forget that night, even if I forgot it for a long time until recently. He also demonstrated that capacitors became inductors at very high frequencies, and the converse, and demonstrated it with the fancy piece of test equipment I had given him (I had found it and had no use for it, but he used it for everything, as it “could test the only things his array of test equipment couldn’t test, and went to very many more numerical places than anything else”—I learned what a mantissa was—I thought it was a type of ray). Plus he explained basic lab electronics to my ex-girlfriend—we are talking years ago, but not long enough that it was shocking and current news—starting with, and only about MOSFETs. Something about the word, something about the action.

Ugh. I was sucked in just as much as his favorite devices are. But he fixed, and had a somewhat loud friend fix several of my devices, which tended to have power regulator circuit/device problems. He inserted some pretty fancy part that took care of things and me, and—hey presto—my rare and wonderful devices worked like waves of magic. I was drunk with smiles, and almost had to be hospitalized with the delirium tremens.

That’s Why Friends are Four. Gone.

A purported friend sent this to P this summer. I wish I had been in a situation in which “Charmed, I’m sure” would have been an appropriate response to meeting this person.

My very dear Peter!

How are things?! How’s ooo? How’s healthy summertime for you?

I wanted to tell you a whole big lot of things in a lengthy message, which I will do, but just not yet, for as right now, I've got only one directive for you:

Watch All That Jazz.

It contains genius script elements such as:

“Katie, I try to give you everything I can give”
“Oh you give alright—presents clothes—I just... wish... you weren’t so generous with your cock...”
(after a contemplative silence)
“That’s good... I can use that some time.”

And:

“Now don’t bullshit a bullshitter.”

Oh and from the wikipedia page:

“Without a daily dose of Vivaldi, Visine, Alka-Seltzer, Dexedrine and sex, he wouldn’t have the energy to keep up the biggest show of them all—his life.”

Now, I haven’t finished watching the film, but as I am only about half an hour in, I already feel pretty certain that you shall appreciate this movie.

Wish you all the very best!

With great friendship and admiration,
o|oo

To this I might up the class a little, up the ante fairly evenly:

Ubi sunt poetry also figures in some of Shakespeare’s plays. When Hamlet finds skulls in the Graveyard (V. 1), these rhetorical questions appear:

Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio, a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy. He hath bore me on his back a thousand times, and now how abhorr’d in my imagination it is! My gorge rises at it. Here hung those lips that I have kiss’d I know not how oft. Where be your gibes now, your gambols, your songs, your flashes of merriment, that were wont to set the table on a roar? Not one now to mock your own grinning—quite chap-fall’n. Now get you to my lady’s chamber, and tell her, let her paint an inch thick, to this favor she must come; make her laugh at that.

[Title.]

Image is of a dining room table, with a fish, is it cod, alewife, or... nah! we don’t eat the dead sea-creatures. It’s an inverted splodge that is meaningful to us, kind of a dating thing. Image © Peter Whincop 2011.

Sorry for all the silly photos. Even though I’ll claim they are virtually untouched, just color-corrected, and made to have their longest side at 998px or 4.99in at 72dpi non-rotation-fixed JPEG, blah and more blah, they are all forgeries. I have shaped every aspect of the images. I don’t have a computer that can zap magic particles at clouds—laser, “sound blaster/laser,” sonic hologram, ionized magic, plasma guns, supersonic dark-matter rays, Bose-Einstein Condensate The Head Phone Tomb, UFOs, god, collective concentration where meditation takes us all to a special shared space, rabies or toxoplasmosis or syphilis (or anything else that alters neural networks). No, I have a 2 1/2-year-old MacBook Pro that is capable of transmitting data even with Airport off, no ethernet connection, and Bluetooth disabled; and it can take videos and photos without the green light going on—a couple of students of mine who worked at Apple as summer interns, posted to our class mailing listed something about the green light being impossible to be disconnected from the iSore camera that comes with MacBook Pros. So, hard wear and tear and wicked coding skills abound. Or a retinal implant, or a deviating optic nerve, or little magnetic pulses* into the cerebellum (“little brain”).

Therefore I shape everything using cloud computing, because with the videos, Final Cut takes forever (hubris takes a oneskin, twoskin, threeskin,... who?) and a day, even briskly, even as fast as is possible when I am visiting the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. (I’m Jew-ish, I can say these things. A, that is.)

*A friend (but I am sure it is an anti-friend relationship), told me what his father’s research was, and what role he played in it. Truly amazing and attractive stuff from SH—it boggles the mind. [To be continued above under “van der Waal Forces are So Passé.]

Oh, a thought while it is still detectable by my fingers: journals such as Literary and Linguistic Computing (which no doubt warrants a <strong> designation) probably have in their wisdom orbifolded ascetic esoterotic—or exo-—advices or sapience more than meets the night-wanderlusting well-read mind’s eye, (ego cogito ergo sum?) they go deeper than that. The academe snakes its head way in secretly, or sneaks its way sacredly: perhaps the same Hegelian synthesis. And my other thought (just two for the night, except I have some music to post, perhaps a silly video I took of Peter and he I think has one of me from my “rock star” days, and the usual flurry of photos) (I had to say that f-word as we have been more than dusted with the white powder slightly iridescent stuff, but not the desiccated variety that... <transmission is lost, Faraday cage alert for 4‘33”—in which at Harvard’s anechoic chamber, now destroyed, the composer famously said he could hear two sounds in the silence. One turned out to be his heart beating, and the other the sound of his own nervous system talking to him or just doing whatever nervous systems do>)

Jelsoft Enterprises Ltd. “testing purity of cocaine” forum—as elucidating as its hygroscopically-inhibited iridescence. Probably other parts of the form, as it usually the case with these things. Superficially it is interesting, quaint use of language though certainly not as offshore as .ru would suggest; and at face-value, FWIW, well, if that is different from a superfice of an edifice, then there might be something in that poetry of such frenetic phonetic ex-streams (across the blood-brain barrier or some encephallic scope* detail of brain activism) of faux-confident posturing. (I’d know a few wasted types thinking not so tactically sound using the logic of two big fat lines, two walrus tusks, that sound in “I am the Walrus” that people make, and walruses are like sea lions which sounds like c-lines, which gets us back full oceanic (to cleveland) circle (for Bostonians), or the sea ess lion or C. S. Lewis lion is Aslan which is an a-gram of nasal, which is something about something I don’t know, fake confidences, gaited struts and facial beams, holding up, I don’t know, their personality bank.)

*Examination of the brain or the cavity of a cerebral abscess by direct inspection. Is that like a drug bust? At the end of Traffic, Catherine ζ-function Jones smuggles blow into California as coke-solid dolls! So a cocaine bust might be something similar, especially when thought of in the context of that actress.

Speaking of transcendent properties and their epistemology (how we come to know things), the:–

Logarithmic derivative on the critical strip

where is the density of zeros of ζ on the critical strip 0 < Re(s) < 1 (δ is the Dirac delta distribution, and the sum is over the nontrivial zeros ρ of ζ).

and

In mathematics, the Prime zeta function is an analogue of the Riemann zeta function, studied by Glaisher (1891). It is defined as the following infinite series, which converges for :

The Euler product for the Riemann zeta function ζ(s) implies that

which by Möbius inversion gives

This gives the continuation of P(s) to , with an infinite number of logarithmic singularities at points where ns is a pole or zero of ζ(s). The line is a natural boundary as the singularities cluster near all points of this line.

Plans are a-Bodypart, Especially a-Foot.

Image © Peter Whincop 2011.

When we walk home from school every night, across the bridge over the ex-river, just bed now, we wish certain things. Not for things, just things. Just. We look in the river. Not so much water there, just ice. Justice.

But our judgments are clouded. Or our cloudments are judged. Call me someone who lived through the 60s—okay Peter was born in the 60s but only just, and I am near to being born in the 80s. No that’s a lie, I wish. We are the same age—it must have been all that acid because I am seeing what they mean when they say you can see things in the clouds. I can see Kennedy’s assassination, and I don’t even know any of the details. It is a virtul history lesson, inchoate. I know it involved an incontrovertible—what sort?—and a building and a gun. I see now how tires are changed on cars, how all those Kiwis and Aussies died at Gallipoli, and if I bought a Tonka tank instead of a car and we (oops!) had a daughter as cute as Peter’s niece <em>>, then we could teach her how to drive it! Even in, or seeing a sand[pit|box] [-bull|-] -terrier. And I think I see a chemistry set for her tenth birthday bunsening away there, and a very pretty girl up there, very. Before we played in our sandpit as kids, we had to check it for cat poop!

Peter says he misses what he thought was you. He was floating on cloud nine. It’s not even that you encouraged people to play golf on the rooftops of our fine city, he could have dealt with that—sh!t fcuked up as. Oddly, I have just thought how strange it is that Harvard has kept the “fas” part of all College/Graduate School of Arts and Science email addresses, e.g. Peter was “whincop@fas.harvard.edu”; it used to be “husc”. But you were to him:–

Flower of this purple dye,
Hit with Cupid’s archery,
Sink in apple of his eye

—William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream

... of a storm, a blogstorm has been brewing like a cup of tea for two, like the two tease in that network channel, TNT, which, to sum up this sentence, are we being asked to first T the second T? Like teeing off the roof where (who? fun-lovers?) flog balls and hit on them. (“Flog” in New Zealand English means to steal, to hit, or to sell off cheaply.) I have exhibited great restraint. And on October 1st, some year, how about this for the screamplay:–

how much of us was real since my changed paintings and drawings reveal a lot but it would take years to analyze them and i am destroying everything you wrote to me physically and by computer because the little i have bothered to interpret has caused a complete identity breakdown which you have witnessed and in fact with others caused and i was supposed to cave but i didn’t even though i now realize the world is a truly despicable and dishonest and disingenuous place and if i am right about you then i despise you more than even you who are evil reified could possibly imagine and i shall not let that rest without converting it into actions which i cannot imagine anyone would especially like and i have to stop my research for the sake of my sanity because both obsession and the content have almost destroyed me in a way you had not planned on but i am far from ruined and i am well [prepared to fully recover] when the time comes and i feel that time is pretty much now and the big question that you could answer with the alternative being far worse by my researching further and you well know i am not that stupid even though you have been so full of misplaced hubris it is risible and i will find out even more and i know way more than you think i know

[There is no reference to bad contraptions, in case the Feds are wondering and listing, or waxing supercilious. We don’t use g*ns. Held them, yes. I’ve also been in an earthmover or groundshaker—I bet they can even do that, those impact and collision geophysicists—people think a meteorite is going to slam into our fair planet in 2012, scatological eschatology—and have operated some lever age or another—I don’t think it actually operated the machine/vehicle itself—but I wouldn’t trust me to do the subtler things of landscape gardening, I’d break the twigs in all the wrong places, push it one leaf too far.] Details were not going to be divulged here. No one knows who we are talking about, and if you do, you are wrong, go reckon again. Sometimes a kittypile is several miaows deep and some purrs too. And we are not talking. We are writing. We are not writing. We are tapping. (Check out our tumblr blog which has one of P’s compositions on it that has some boring detail about not talking or writing. Dumb.)

And then there is this, and I hope including the entire lyrics of a Loquat song is not naughty: I thought perhaps it was the other way around (read the lyrics), but, no. Well, perhaps now. But it was you, in innumerable ways, and I mean that in an ℵ₁ measure. Generously. The whole quotation here is for academic reasons, as we are both music faculty, to the word, not to the letters (haven’t got that Ph.D., fifteen years down the track; I got the idiot’s Harvard A.M. degree which means I suck). I am smitten with the voice and songs of Loquat (the timbre of the guitar is a bit nasty, not to criticize the actual work of the guitar, but the engineer got better at it in the second then third album; the singer’s voice is amazing amazing, especially when notes are hit exactly—which she is does for sure, or with no shouting; all perfect in the following song), and they sing of such tortured types of woe, some might say facile, some might say difficult (or even difficile), even fruitless, I’d certainly say with a culture of women claiming their rightful turf, as sisters they should. I’m more for siblings and everyone, but, etc. And I know this is a kittypile of kittypiles. A veritable palimpets. I say, wear their t-shirts and wait for their next album. You’re just a dandelion seed, that flies through the air, randomly, and disappears....

You used to throw gourds out the window
And I’d cover my mouth, laughing
You’d eat your broccoli with ketchup and cottage cheese
We look kind of the same
But you're different because you’re a time bomb

You’re not my strawberry girl
I know I’m awkward around myself
But this isn’t fun anymore
You make me feel obsolete

And it’s taken so long for me
To ignore you
And I'm so proud of myself

I never could predict the moment
When I’d be thrown in the closet
And I’d be stuck in there for months
Sitting locked in the dark

Mushed into my clothes
I’m much too afraid to ask you
To let me out of here
And start over without you

—Loquat, “Time Bomb” (Before the Momentum) [© attribution]

I don’t know if a disclaimer is necessary or not. And this just in, hot off the 1912 press, by Joe Hill, a Swedish immigrant, an itinerant laborer who was active in the IWW. He made up the now-famous expression:–

Long-haired preachers come out every night,
Try to tell you what’s wrong and what’s right;
But when asked how ’bout something to eat
They will answer with voices so sweet:

You will eat, bye and bye,
In that glorious land above the sky;
Work and pray, live on hay,
You’ll get pie in the sky when you die.

...

—Joe Hill, “The Preacher and the Slave” [© attribution]

He then goes on to attack the Salvation Army and their hymn “In the Sweet Bye and Bye.” I wanted to use a nickname for them, since we call them the Sallies in NZ, but I see here they are the Sally Ann. One of the first links I clicked was alt.lawyers (cached in case this one bites it; this is true for everything I include), presumably as old as usenet itself. Ah, those lawyers, never can tell with language like that. Must have used more than just uuencode (from the man page: “Uuencode and uudecode are used to transmit binary files over transmission mediums that do not support other than simple ASCII data”—that has me thinking back to soundfiles...). And the Wikipedia page on Usenet has, as with most things freely dispersing around the internet appearing not to make money, the most amazing diagrams, which I will reproduce, with a wink in my left eye. (The right one got an apple jammed in it. Kind of got shoved in my mug. In fact, a crabapple. Yeah, that’s it, crabapple jelly and custard pie.) (I also wonder about buildings changing hands for big bucks but never a lot being done with them. Useful for the fourth of July, to get a good view I suspect—Cambridge/Boston’s fireworks are amazing, with pyrotechnic cubes and happy faces from the 60s and also numbers—or even for the finale in V for Vendetta, which I imagine 43% of MIT’s student population might like. Oh, meta-Google “Google Ron Paul” or go to http://www.apfn.net/ (or .org), a not-OTT fantastic web site in general, good essays. The first of its kind, I think. The video on how good capitalism is is a hoot.

Oh, here is the Wikipedia Usenet main map:

The other two diagrams will be in my next post because they are fascinating are here! Their descriptions make so much fall into place—the article (not so much usenet itself but its freakishly ubiquitous clones), the diagrams taken as a whole, free data sources, exchanges, Yiddish words like yadda yadda*. In that way it disturbs me: too much excitement is, well, too much incitement, and having such curiosity as to give rise to fascination doesn’t let me sit back and do nothing. It makes me want to use the bathroom! And to write.

“A diagram of Usenet servers and clients. The blue, green, and red dots on the servers represent the groups they carry. Arrows between servers indicate newsgroup group exchanges (feeds). Arrows between computers and servers indicate that a user is subscribed to a certain group and reads or submits articles.” [From Wikipedia, “Usenet.” Benjamin D. Esham, the copyright holder of this work, published it under the Public Domain license.]

“A visual example of the many complex steps required to prepare data to be uploaded to usenet newsgroups. These steps must be done again in reverse to download data from usenet.” [From Wikipedia, “Usenet.” Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported, 2.5 Generic, 2.0 Generic and 1.0 Generic license.]

*And just because, I wanted to find a Latin translation of “yadda yadda,” as I saw it in an excellent book recently. I think it was borreo, fascio, or something like that, but I couldn’t find the idiom. I did, however, find this. I think there needs to be a theorem a little more sophisticated than the four-color map theorem: we need a wherefore color map theorem that not only proves things about figure–ground colorings, but about boundary conditions of colors in general, using endomorphisms, orbifolds, and graph theory. I will be posting on maps in the next fortnight (I was too weak to thing of the American term); I have a number of old maps, and books on maps, and looking down on earth from space I doubt has one in awe for any reason other than for its awesomeness; looking down on maps of countries, or counties, or heroin trafficking routes (there’s a great French cartographer who produces remarkable maps of “transportation”—the cotton trade, Hannibal’s tour of Europe, etc. and I will bring in many examples from him. And after that, unusually coded, or claimed-to-be-coded, texts, such as the Voynich manuscript—I thought it was “Voisnitch”!—and the Codex Seraphinianus—I have a tumblr-to-be blog post on that incredible Codex), bemuse me, like the pieces are put together in such a way that... you’ll see. It has in a painful way fascinated me for years. Again, as this is a slightly anachronistic editing effort, on my Tumblr blog, which runs parallel to this but the two never duplicate each other, I have music, Peter’s, since we haven’t worked out how to do it on Blogger. One piece talks about strange things, include maps. Briefly, but it’s the context, and what a con-text it is. (Our own site, anon-∞, has links to all these pre-figured blogs, sites, bookmarking things, social networking sites to be ignored, sites for posting sounds, music, and art, a writing publishing site, etc.)

Incidentally, my astrological sign is Taurus. The Bull. Makes me stubborn. And mine is Aquarius. The water bearer. Makes me bloated. [© attribution]