10.28.2005

How Sweet It Is!!!

Oh lord a darker omen I cannot imagine. Read on and shudder in terror at the horrible doom that is about to befall New York City!

Quoted from the New York Times:

Good Smell Perplexes New Yorkers

By KAREEM FAHIM
Published: October 28, 2005

An unseen, sweet-smelling cloud drifted through parts of Manhattan last night. Arturo Padilla walked through it and declared that it was awesome.

"It's like maple syrup. With Eggos. Or pancakes," he said. "It's pleasant."

The odor had followed Mr. Padilla and his friend along their walk in Lower Manhattan, from a dormitory on Fulton Street, to Pace University on Spruce Street, and back down again, to where they stood now, near a Dunkin' Donuts. Maybe it was from there, he said. But it wasn't.

Mr. Padilla was not alone. Reports of the syrupy cloud poured in from across Manhattan after 9 p.m. Some feared that it was something sinister.

There were so many calls that the city's Office of Emergency Management coordinated efforts with the Police and Fire Departments, the Coast Guard and the City Department of Environmental Protection to look into it.

By 11 p. m., the search had turned up nothing harmful, according to tests of the air. Reports continued to come in from as far north as 112th Street shortly before midnight. In Lower Manhattan, where the smell had begun to fade, it was back, stronger than before, by 1 a.m.

"We are continuing to sample the air throughout the affected area to make sure there's nothing hazardous," said Jarrod Bernstein, an emergency management spokesman. "What the actual cause of the smell is, we really don't know."

There were conflicting accounts as to its nature. A police officer who had thrown out her French vanilla coffee earlier compared it to that. Two diplomats from the Netherlands disagreed, politely. Rieneke Buisman said it smelled like roasted peanuts. Her friend Joris Geeven said it reminded him of a Dutch cake called peperkoek, though he could not describe that smell.

10.22.2005

Tiniest Car EVER!

No really, I'm not sure why, and I'm too lazy to make some crap up right now, but this seems like it's probably an omen of some kind.

"The nanocar consists of a chassis and axles made of well-defined organic groups with pivoting suspension and freely rotating axles. The wheels are buckyballs, spheres of pure carbon containing 60 atoms apiece. The entire car measures just 3-4 nanometers across, making it slightly wider than a strand of DNA. A human hair, by comparison, is about 80,000 nanometers in diameter."

10.16.2005

Raissa

If one were to look at my sidebar (which by the way is perhaps the worst kind of bar -- armbar, open bar, sand bar, minibar, crowbar -- these are all finer bars...) one would see that my two favourite thinkers are Xenophenes and Italo Calvino. I have relied upon Jacque Lacan's brilliance before, but I realized that I have never before demonstrated to my readers the radiant eloquence of Calvino or the piercing insight of Xenophanes. So today I will present to you a quotation from "Invisible Cities" by Italo Calvino.

HIDDEN CITIES 1

In Raissa, life is not happy. People wring their hands as the walk in the streets, curse the crying children, lean on the railings over the river and press their fists to their temples. In the morning you wake from one bad dream and another begins. At the workbenches where, every moment, you hit your finger with a hammer or prick it with a needle, or over the columns of figures all awry in the ledgers of merchants and bankers, or at the rows of empty glasses on the zince counters of the wineshops, the bent heads at least conceal the general grim gaze. Inside the houses it is worse, and you do not have to enter to learn this: in the summer windows resound with quarrels and broken dishes.

And yet, in Raissa, at every moment there is a child in a window who laughs seeing a dog that has jumped on a shed to bite into a piece of polenta dropped by a stonemason who has shouted from the top of the scaffolding. 'Darling, let me dip into it,' to a young serving-maid who holds up a dish of ragout under the pergola, happy to serve it to the umbrella-maker who is celebrating a successful transaction, a white lace parasol bouth to display at the races by a great lady in love with an officer who has smiled at her taking the last jump, happy man, and still happier his horse, flying over the obstacles, seeing a francolin flying in the sky, happy bird freed from its cage by a painter happy at having painted it feather by feather, speckled with red and yellow in the illumination of that page in the volume where the philosopher says: 'Also in Raissa, city of sadness, there runs an invisible thread that binds one living being to another for a moment, then unravels, then is stretched again between moving points as it draws new and rapid patterns so that at every second the unhappy city contains a happy city unaware of its own existence.'


This is what lacan's logic, and indeed all critical analysis, can never see, because it can not be examined from outside, it can only be lived from within. The only thing I would question about this excerpt is his use of the word "philosopher" where he clearly means sage. it is supposed to be set in the far and mystical east though... philosophers never see the hidden city of happiness.

10.14.2005

Hell lo!

Many people don't believe the prophecies of Nostradamus. They claim they could mean anything because they are so metaphoric and vague. But listen to this and watch how I break it down!

There shall be discovered a new land like the human body and this land shall be replete with omens of our destruction. In each body part shall we see different omens. In the armpit of this new land we shall see the rise of the toothed lizard of Egypt in a new form. There shall be a school dedicated to the engorged lord of the floods. And from this school shall flow a libation of lizard's blood which will fuel the champions of the new land.

So far this is all pretty obvious. He's talking about florida, alligators, FSU and gatorade. Let's continue.

But into this swampy muck shall come an even greater demon -- Uroboros, known to the frozen barbarians as Nidhogg. And lo, the two scaled demons shall be locked in combat for many many years.

Now we might think that the scaled demons are Kirstie Ally and Anna Nicole Smith, but you would be wrong. Here old Nostra is simply referring to a clash between the suborder of Sauria and the suborder of Serpentes. Nidhogg is of course the serpent that chews on the roots of Yggdrasil and I know I need not explain Uroboros to my readers. Nosto goes on.

And then, lo, in the tenth year of their combat, lo, the slithering one and lo, the toothed one as well, shall lock, lo!, in a doubly mortal coil, and lo they shall both be felled low. Hell lo!

So, we can see that the snake and the gator shall do deadly combat and when they both perish, Hades shall become manifest upon the surface of this earth. Well dear reader's you shan't find more specific confirmation of a seven hundred year old prognostication than this:

Feast your eyes upon PROPHECY FULFILLED.

10.06.2005

I'm woefully behind!

LOok aT THiS!

http://www.harpers.org/ExcerptNoneDare.html


Remember those exit polls, those pesky exit polls, polling people upon exiting and asking them who they had voted for for president? Remember them? And remember how they had all said Kerry won and then Bush had won and then everyone laughed at those exit polls? Remember? Well apparently, given the "actual results," and the fact that they were all consistently off in the same direction, the odds against those exit polls being so wildly optimistic as they were were 17.5 million to one.

Oh but it gets worse and worse and worse. In the Ohio recount, employees of Triad (not the chinese mafia, but the actual name of the company that makes the computerized voting machines) had to be dispatched to dozens of different polling stations to "fix" the machines so that the test-run of the machine recount would match the hand recount. What the hell kind of "fixing" were they doing? And how come no-one cared that they were broken?

According to my calculations corruption this extreme shouldn't be happening for at least another 11 years and it already happened, last year. It gets worse and worse and worse and more shocking and disturbing though. I won't burden you with the details, I will just ask that you please oh please oh please go and read this article from Harper's which I read today and nearly lost my lunch -- which would have been quite tragic for eye had just eaten a dozen raw quails stuffed with caviar, mushy and delectable like gigantic room-temperature raviolis!

10.04.2005

PINK FUZZY DOOOOOOM!

Oh Ye Gods Have Mercy! If a 200 foot pink plush rabbit collapsed across an Italian hillside is not a sign of the apocalypse? Than what is???

http://www.woostercollective.com/2005/09/world-largest-plush-toy-installed-on.html