John Menick | Archive for July, 2006

Artist Walid Raad writing from Beirut:

…Rumors aplenty, every ten minutes. The news, all of it, Arab and international, makes me sick. We are stuck with a false choice: Support HizbAllah, or be an Israeli agent. That is at least what HizbAllah and their Syrian allies are saying. The Christian right’s position is equally naive. They want to assume that HizbAllah will just go away. they are wishing it at least. That wont happen, no matter what. Everyone is miscalculating it seems: HizbAllah, the Americans, the Israelis, The Saudis, the Palestinians, The French, The Russians, The Chinese. You name it. The effects on the ground will remain once this crisis is resolved, and has already generated enough antagonism to last us another decade…

…Doi we need to say this again and again and again: There is no such thing as targeted/surgical shelling in a city with hundreds of thousands of homes, built cheek to cheek. Israel shelled the house of Hassan Nasrallah. I suppose they thought he would be home enjoying his afternoon tea at the time. They took out the light house that stood on the Corniche, lest it send out distress signals that the world will not see. A family leaving, fleeing its village in the South was pulverized — surely the smoke from the shelling blinded the scope of the gunner, preventing him/her from seeing that the small people in the car were not extremely short HizbAllah fighters. Should we tally numbers? Do we need to open more morgue doors b to reveal yet another mangled body, yet another weeping parent, yet another angry relative denouncing this or that government? this or that policy?

Complete text posted on The Thing. (Via Ricardo.)

Tesla is 150 and Syd Barrett is dead.

The Searchers — AKA “the worst best movie” according to Slate. Then again, hasn’t this topic been covered before?

The economics of repugnance.

Chris Moukarbel in the Times.

Bright Lights film journal gets its blog on.

Looking for a pro geodesic dome? Pacific Domes is your answer, and ZDNet has a profile. From the article:

The company started in 1980 after [Pacific Domes owner Asha] Deliverance had been living in a monastery and built a rudimentary dome using Fuller’s geometry because she needed a place to live.

Quickly, she learned that others wanted them. So she ended up building a dozen. That turned into a business.

Flash forward to 2005 and the devastated Gulf Coast region, where relief workers in Biloxi, Miss., and in an area of New Orleans were using domes donated by the company as distribution centers for food and equipment.

Also: Best of Friends: R. Buckminster Fuller and Isamu Noguchi at the Noguchi Museum (May 19, 2006 – October 15, 2006 ).

While researching something in the OED today, I noticed a posting to the hallowed publication’s site informing us that the editors have, well, updated the English language.

It’s a weird bunch of updates overall. Some triumphs for tech: nanobot, Google, Chowhound, and hacktivism. Some bizarre omissions: Italian-American, usual suspects, codec, close-caption, and fucking (adj., adv., and int.). Some just bizarre: bouncebackability, autobiopic, and, um, rug muncher. Yeah, okay… here is the rest of the list, for the complete list (including word types) follow the link above:

401(k), adware, agri, air kiss, amaretto, Amarone, anacronym, andropause, animateur, anoraky, asylee, autobiopic, automagically, backlist, backlisted, backlisting, bad taste, bashment, Biosteel, bivvy, body-surf, body-surfing, bouncebackability, bourgie, brewmaster, Brillo, broker, Cadbury code, calzone, canyoning, carpet muncher, catfight, chav, chavvy, cheesesteak, chib, chib, chile mulato, chip and PIN, choanderm, chowhound, clocked, clocking, clocking, close-caption, close-captioning, codec, counterterrorism, counterterrorism, crunk, Cullen Skink, cybrarian, cybrary, diddy diddy, digicam, distractability, distractable, doobrey, dotcom, dromaeosaur, dromaeosaurid, DVD, ecotoxic, ecotoxiicity, Energizer bunny, engine room, euonym, fakelore, faux, feel-bad, flat-share, flat-sharer, flat-sharing, flightseeing, focaccia, freakazoid, free energy, fucking, FYI, geno-, geocache, geocaching, Gibbs, Google, go-to, grinch, gut-buster, gynocentric, gynocentrism, hacktivism, hacktivist, Hall of shame, halloumi, ho-bag, Hold ‘Em, houseshare, housesharer, housesharing, iconify, infantilize, inner sanctum, irie, Italian-American, J-cloth, just war, Kalamata, keepy-up, keepy-uppy, limited-over, love-struck, Macarena, Mackem, mash-up, mesohyl, nadger, nanobot, off book, on book, out of place, PG, reimagine, resveratrol, rewriteable, route one, rug muncher, screenable, self-storage, semi-skimmed, skatepunk, soirée musicale, Speedo, squoval, Stanley knife, Subbeteo, super-max, super-maximum, tee, texting, text message, Tripitaka, uninstall, usual suspects, Utahraptor, Velociraptor, vert, vibe, vice grip, voddy, Walter Mitty, Walter Mittyish, wazoo, win-win, yada yada

The New York Times Magazine has a fascinating article by Evan Ratliff on one of the more obscure areas of neurology: chronic or pervasive déjà vu, also apparently known as persistent déjà vécu. Among other things, the article describes the experience of one man referred to by his initials A.K.P.:

He refused to read the newspaper or watch television because he said he had seen it before. However, A.K.P. remained insightful about his difficulties: when he said he had seen a program before and his wife asked him what happened next, he replied, “How should I know, I have a memory problem!” The sensation … was extremely prominent when he went for a walk — A.K.P. complained that it was the same bird in the same tree singing the same song … When shopping, A.K.P. would say that it was unnecessary to purchase certain items, because he had bought the item the day before.

Ratliff also gives a brief description of the naming of this “paramnesia” or “phantasm of memory”:

At a scientific meeting in 1896, the neurologist F. L. Arnaud proposed that scientists unify their descriptions under a single term, “déjà vu.” He also recounted the unusual case of Louis, a 34-year-old who had recovered from cerebral malaria. Louis, as the Cambridge psychiatrist German Berrios wrote in a summary of Arnaud’s work, “showed ‘the first symptoms characteristic of déjà vu’ when he started claiming that he could recognize certain newspaper articles that he said he had read previously.” Louis felt that he “recognized” nearly every experience, a sensation he described as “I am living in two parallel years.” Arnaud even took Louis to a funeral (Louis Pasteur’s, as it happened) to see if he would claim to have remembered it. He did.