Liminal

Buck Rogers Conquors the Youniverse

When my creative urge outlasts my capacity for coherent thought you never know what you're going to get, other than by, with a little help from your friends. If that doesn't make any sense, bear in mind that I've been awake altogether too long.

Anyway, the point is that Knockout and I made this thing.

Phantom whiskers

I never cease to be surprised when, on shaving days, I have an itch on my arm or hand and I instinctively move it against my face.

RIP Don Knotts.

Chris Manly's birthday tonight

Went to a party with these aholes. Got drunk, not for the first time today. Dropped my camera. Had wine spilled all over me. Rock and roll.

Resolution

Entropy

Regular readers of this blog may recall the story about the gum on my pants. Well, I forgot about it and ran it through the warsh. It's on there, but good, now. Kinda looks like I bird-crapped my pants.

Separately (although, ironically, joined into one photographic image) my shoelace exploded.

If this were a MyXangaJournal, I would let you know that my mood is pissed off and I've been listening to "Yesterday".

Simon? Is that you?

I don't know what's up with this thing, but it's definately cool looking.

Welcome to Stony Brook...

Let's play Trick the Blind. Or, actually, since that's just a perfectly flat piece of paper, I guess it's let's play Pretend we have Braille on our Doors.

In fairness, that's from a building (Heavy Engineering) under construction.

Check it out

My pen matches my shirt.

More photographic leftovers

This is how the news is writ

High and low

Today was pretty good. I got some pesky class reading out of the way, helped out with newspaper production, got some exercise, enjoyed alcohol in uncharacteristic moderation and watched two motion picture shows.

Read about the colonization of Africa. Had to look up a couple words, compradore and conessionaire, so I feel like, even if I don't remember what the hell happened in Buganda at the end of the nineteenth century, I may have learned something. Oh, I definately learned that if you're going to try and repel European domination, you want to luck into drawing the cupidity of the bumbling Italians, who I imagine looking an awful lot like Roberto Benigni on the battlefield.

We had a fiesty editorial board meeting in which I spearheaded the ultimately losing case for reprinting the notorious cartoons of Mohammed. Relaxed after that with a little hallway football. Those damn cielings are too low.

Caught Jarhead and Final Destination 3. I'm only going to talk about the second. It was pretty terrible, granted, but I had a great time watching it. I think I had the most fun of anyone in that theatre. It was the Island 16, where they serve drinks, like in Europe.

Oh, and my passport arrived in the mail.

Wow, I was on such a buzz until I just now noticed that Rodney fell down off my wall.

You are beneath Randall

Washingtonspeak

Congressman Curt Weldon, the Republican number two on the House Armed Services Committee, brought his "heated months long crusade" (so described by The Hill) to a climactic public hearing. Weldon has been pursuing the accusation that a Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) "cell" (?) identified September 11 ringleader Mohammad Atta more than a year before the attacks, and that other government agencies failed to act on their warnings. Weldon further accuses the Pentagon of trying to cover up the story.

Among the more inflamatory items in the hearings: according to the testimony of supposed whistleblower Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer, DIA admitted destroying relevant documents (presumably in a closed congressional hearing); according to Congressman Weldon's chief of staff Russ Caso, the 9/11 commission was aware of but made no mention of "Able Danger" (the DIA project said to have identified Atta as a threat early) because "It did not fit with the story we wanted to tell".

But my favorite part of this whole thing is the response by Stephan Cambone, Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence, to Weldon's accusations that Defense is squashing whistleblowers (emphasis mine): "I can assure you that no one is being subject to threats that I'm aware of."

Don't miss the punchline

Today was the involvement fair, a student clubs and organizations promotional jamboree. Here we see the Enduring Freedom Alliance, the College Republicans wearing their nonpartisan hats. They are seated, appropriately enough, next to the Ghost Hunter's Society. I don't know if you can see the T-shirt on that dude on the right, but it seems that he, too, is a Hunter of Ghosts. For you see, a spectre is haunting Europe...

Speaking of seminal texts in modern Western political science, I enjoyed watching Lost tonight, but I think they may have crossed a certain silliness line when they had the character named John Locke start talking about the ramifications of a state of war.

The world keeps all its best stuff in an old, unused fire hose cabinet

Finding a discarded "The World Still Says No To War" flyer is the left's answer to shittily mass-produced "These Colors Don't Run" bumper stickers that have faded away.

Fishy!

Fishy!

Fishy!

Fishy!

Fishy!

Self Portrait

Here I am in Plato's cave.

This is, perhaps, more succinct

My buddy James made this, it's even better than the cockroach.

Here's what I got for you:

This Unspeakable Crime
A found poem, taken from the Vatican Press' 1962 "On the Manner of Proceeding in Cases of Solicitation" as it alludes to "Sacrum Poenitentiae".

Whether by words or signs or nods of the head
Whether by touch or by writing whether then or after read

Whether he has had with that penitent
            prohibited
            and improper
            speech
            or activity

With reckless daring

Internet, will you be my valentine?

I got you this giant cockroach.

Too many special days

Tonight (before midnight) was Claudia's 21st birthday. It was cool except she did too much of the cooking/cleaning for her own party, got a second degree burn and one of her asshole suitemates called the RA on duty and got her party kicked out of her suite.

But we all got to enjoy this wonderful trifle, pictured above, composed by Mel B. Yes, Scary Spice came and made dessert. Claudia is that cool.

President Lincoln also came, because it was his birthday as well. He built a log cabin out of meatloaf. Sadly, most of the partygoers were vegetarians and he won't be invited back next year.

I guess it's Valentine's Day now. Happy one of those.

Confidential to Frank

This is what snow looks like.

A'yuh, storm's a'comin'

Some time earlier this evening, perhaps shortly after my last post, the car alarm finally stopped. A few hours later, the snow started coming down. I've started taking some staggeringly mundane movies with my lil' digital camera. I've got one of my phone spinning in place as it vibrates an alarm, and one of a water fountain issuing water. Groundbreaking work. I tried to take a movie of the snow coming down, but you can barely see anything, and you can't hear the loud wind that I thought would sound cool, and basically all I did was get cold.

bloopbloopbloopbloopbloop

Fr3sh is strong!

A pound of fr3sh!

Fr3sh...he'll save every one of us!

From the grotto

I was going to go on for some length aboot the Carnival Grotesque (which, according to some dude who deserves proper citation, is the slipperiest of aesthetics). It is in my mind because I have to write a paper aboot it. As it turns out, I'm going to dash of and get some food for me and café for a couple of Mel's, and watch some old Lost eps. So this is all you get on that slippery of aesthetics: some dude, who may or may not be the previously mentioned dude (I might edit in the scholars' names later), thinks that the grotesque is best defined by the emotional reaction it elicits (leading to shifting characterizations of the same artistic works as audiences change). If a work evokes laughter, astonishment and either disgust or horror--you got the grotesque. So, anyway, who thinks that Keith Schofield's video for The Notwist's "One With the Freaks" qualifies? Oh, I almost forgot to mention, the grotesque characteristically mixes people, animals and plants. So the anthropomorphicization of the jellyfish protagonist and the monstrous palm tree are right in line. Speaking of music video director Schofield, I just today saw his new video ("When I Wake Up"), and you should to, because it is tres cool.

Other news:
We are well into day four of the Fr3sh affair. That's right, the car alarm is still going off. Also, I picked up some new batteries for the camera, so maybe you'll get some pictures again.

Thursday night out

I just got back from the bar (Velvet Lounge, they call it).

Fr3sh's car alarm is still going off, at least 48 hours since I first heard it.

I walk into my dorm room and I see something funny on my chair. It almost looks like there's a hole in the chair and stuffing is coming out. Nope...it's something sticky, turns out it's gum. Yes. Gum fragments on the chair. And, wait, what's that? Gum on my ass. All night, white gum on black pants. Nobody bothered to mention this to me.

It's been a wonderful week.

Crodberry and Vandka

Lost was laugh-out-loud delicious tonight. Well, I guess I was the only one in the room laughing, but it was still pretty good, any way you're sliced. And to think I almost forgot it was even on.

So there's a car alarm that is audible in my room when all internal sources of sound are silenced, and it's been going off for more than 24 hours, and it's really pissing me off. I checked out the car. The license plate says Fr3sh. No word on dice in the mirror, or anything fun like that.

I've been missing, for a couple weeks now, my second pair of NiMH batteries for my digital camera, which is why I haven't been taking/posting any pictures. I'm far less inclined to take the camera out if I'm expecting to end up out of juice at any moment.

I'm more than a little pissed off at Office Max / Office Depot, neither of which will tell me how much my print job will cost with tax, requisite for the onerous soul-crushing paperwork engineered to prevent student groups from ever accomplishing anything. What are they, stupid?

Obligatory blogatory

I think I'm finally getting over this broad, if not deep, influenzer that's been haunting me this past week.

I was playing with some web design last night and tonight, mostly because I captured this amazing (to me, at least) digital photograph that totally lends itself to backgrounding a web page. You won't find much there in the way of content, but check out my efforts. Propers to Daddy Warlegs for suggesting I space the lines out a little more.

So I had to memorize a poem to recite in my Voice of the Actor class. I knew there were lots of poems on the internet, but I didn't know if any of them were for me? But I am a success story, and you can be to! Well, not in terms of my first recitation, I promptly forgot the bulk of the poem and had to start over and read it off the sheet, but in terms of finding a little poem I loved by wandering through the internet. It's by Philip Levine (thank you, Mr. Holt), and it's called "A Theory of Prosody". It's pretty neat. If you're at Stony Brook, you should allow me to recite it to you, because I need to do more work on it. And get over my flu. And have a better respiratory system / back musculature. Then my recitation will rule.

I had this great sense memory of Werner von Kitty sleeping on my chest all lined up to draw on during my reading, but it was all I could do get something approximating the words out, and there was no room for anything fancy like that.

No more recursion tonight

But, since you've been good, you get another in my fine campus at twilight series. This picture would have been super awesome if it wasn't shakeyhands blurry. Ah, well.

This one is for Jeff

The State of our Union is dangerously sexy

So I started watching part of the President's speech the other day with Cappy and (Y/J/H?)elena. It was s'posed to be a big ol' drinkin' party but nobody showed up, Yelena wasn't drinking, I had the inluenza majora and no cups with which to sanitarily share Cappy's booze, and then a fire alarm went off. We were in the Student Union, so you can make a joke there if you like, about the state of the union. Get it?

Anyway, the "party" turned out to be kinda lame and we all stopped watching. Then I kicked coffee on them because I am a spaz. But the point is I missed the part where the president raised the unholy spectre of human-animal hybrids. I didn't realize we had waltzed so close to that precipice. It's a good thing he launched that program to get to Mars, I would hate if the human-animal hybrids got their filthy paws on the Red Planet first.

He also want to cut our addiction to fossil fuels, he says. That's a good project to tackle, now that he has rid Africa of AIDS and baseball of steroids. What a president! The state of my heartbeat is excited with pride!