Not Just a Great Pun...
Might have escaped notice, but there have been apparently enormous queues of gay couples outside San Francisco courthouses, waiting to get married. The legal aspects of this are still a bit lost on me, but apparently it's a municipal legislature vs. state legislature jurisdictional thing, gay marriage legal in SF, illegal in CA. Like I say, I haven't been following it all *that* closely.

However, what I've started to follow a bit more closely is a grassroots movement to support the couples who are standing on line to get married. Total strangers from across the US and all over the world are contributing to this site to buy bouquets of flowers and distribute them to random couples waiting outside the courthouse. I love it.

Flowers for Al and Don


- posted by slaughts @ 3:07 PM

 
Barcode...
Dehumanizing, but amusing. Apparently this says I'm a fat 39-year-old white guy living in Canada.

Barcode Yourself (via boingboing)


- posted by slaughts @ 1:05 PM

 
Onionism...
The Onion is, as the masthead says, "America's Finest News Source."

The Onion : Fox News Problem Solvers In Way Over Their Heads


- posted by slaughts @ 5:10 PM

 
Pynchonalia...
So apparently, part of the reason I come to India is to read books that confuse the hell out of me. Just finished another Thomas Pynchon novel, "The Crying of Lot 49" (this time last year I struggled through both "Mason & Dixon" and "Gravity's Rainbow"), and I'm utterly mystified. But apparently, that's the idea.

Pynchon: The Crying of Lot 49 : "The text is almost completely 'open,' and readers who are looking for a single interpretation are setting themselves up for failure. Even after several readings one finds that the novel deliberately evades solutions -- indeed, this is one of the hallmarks of Pynchon's unique style."



Don't get me wrong, I liked the book. It's supposed to be his most "accessible" and I have to say that it's reasonably straight-forward, as Pynchonsmanship goes. For that matter, even though they were both heavy slogs, I enjoyed the hell out of both "Mason & Dixon" and "Gravity's Rainbow"... and got just enough of the references and was clued into enough of the shifting timelines and managed to keep track of enough members of the casts of thousands to understand that I was missing an absurd amount.

As with most things, it's mainly just a question of effort. I'm willing to expend enough of an effort to read 'em, just not to really dig into 'em. But I can definitely see how others get completely stuck into him. I just don't understand all their jokes.
- posted by slaughts @ 8:44 PM

 
Color me stupid...
I only found out about this at Christmas, trying to pick up some salmon for Shelley. Never having been much of a fish-fancier, but always conceptually supportive of aquaculture as an industry, the whole color controversy might have passed me by had we not encountered it at King Soopers that fateful Thursday.

Wired:The 15 Colors of Salmon : "...as the COLOR ADDED labels cropping up in supermarkets suggest, the aquacultured fillet's pinkish hue is a testament to engineering, not nature. The labels refer to the food additives canthaxanthin and astaxanthin. Without them, the flesh of farmed salmon - which don't eat the krill that colors the wild ones - would be gray."


- posted by slaughts @ 12:01 PM

 
World66
Okay, pretty naff... the online version of comparing passport stamps. But here you go... 20 countries, 8% of the world.

World66, the travel guide you write:




- posted by slaughts @ 12:30 AM

 
Skills Found Only In China
Dave Garcia sent me these... have the feeling they've been making their way around the Internet for quite some time. Based on personal experience, these are exactly the sort of thing you see all the time in Zhongguo... just never when you have a camera handy.

Skills Found Only In China : eight photos


- posted by slaughts @ 5:10 PM

 
Rajasthan Taxi
My pal Sanjit (who was driving) described this picture as capturing the situation in which India finds itself today, "...stuck between the Middle Ages and McDonalds."

It was a lucky snap, actually.

Rajasthan Taxi


- posted by slaughts @ 2:37 AM

 
Look and Feel Canadian... Instantly!
Very droll pharmaceuticals from Canadian artist Dana Wyse's cleverly-named Jesus Had A Sister Productions ("Helping you to create your own reality since 1789"). Hosted on the website of a Brussels art gallery with an equally clever name... but apparently Wyse also sold these on a rack at a pharmacy in Biel, Switzerland.

In an peculiarly-translated interview posted on the website at Vancouver's Third Avenue Gallery, Wyse says she prefers a "graffiti" style delivery of her artwork: "Sometimes, I get up at 5 a.m. and place flyers on the dashboards of cars with slogans like 'Sell Your Soul!', 'You Shall Receive Everything You Desire', or 'Filtering Isn`t Necessary'."

aeroplastics contemporary: Dana Wyse - Jesus Had A Sister Productions


- posted by slaughts @ 1:25 AM

 
Unclean... unclean...
Occured to me on the way in to the office this morning that at least some of the random disfigurement I see on the streets of India isn't simply the result of the casual brutality that's just part of life in the third world. It's not merely attributable to a higher incidence of accidental maiming in a highly accident-prone society.

Nope. It's leprosy.

We took a slightly different route this morning, and passed a leprosy clinic as we came to work, and the penny finally dropped. Leprosy... how very 21st century.

Which means that when Stumpy and his feculent cousins come knocking at the car window at stoplights looking for a handout (err... stump-out), there's as good a chance as any that they're not just run-of-the-mill filthy beggars -- they're actually run-of-the-mill filthy leper beggars.

Turns out that India has the world's largest population of lepers worldwide -- in 2002, about 473,000 of Asia's total number of 520,000 leprosy cases were found here. Last year another half a million people were apparently infected with leprosy.

Okay, a lot of it is simple mathematics; if you start with more than a billion people, working on a simple percentage basis, the numbers get very big very fast. But still... in India, the equivalent of entire city of Denver was infected with leprosy between 2002 and 2003. Holy shit.

Not sure what to do with this new-found piece of information. Requires a lot more mulling over.
- posted by slaughts @ 1:41 PM

 
An Itch for Collecting
Something about the universality of dorsal pruritus inspires all manner of insipid, annoying, and just plain twee artistic efforts. However, in some cases, it causes an itch that only obsessive collecting can scratch.

Back Scratcher: Gideon Weiss`s Private collection


- posted by slaughts @ 8:56 PM

 
Philosophistry
...so apparently, I'm a Kantian (100%) with strong Millist tendencies (99%) and an Aquinian outlook (94%). Nietzsche can kiss my 'nards (68%), and Augustine doesn't even figure (37%). But then again, neither do the Cynics (34%), which I guess sort of surprises me. Now we all know.

ETHICAL PHILOSOPHY SELECTOR: "These questions reflect the dilemmas that have captured the attention of history’s most significant ethical philosophers."

I suppose it's fairly easy to game a "selecter" like this, simply by writing the fields so that they will point to a certain result most of the time. But then again, that wouldn't really be terribly ethical, and for an exercise intended to explore issues of ethics and morality, that would certainly be a hypocritical twist... creating a "deus ex machina" would be worth of at least a couple hours musing on the concept of free will, anyway.
- posted by slaughts @ 2:40 AM

 
A Softer World
Softer, maybe, but also a darker, more cynical, and slickly hipper world. This weekly "comic" strip has been going for about a year now, and they've put together some very funny and creative panels. Check out the archives.

A Softer World: I'm sorry I took your beauty for granted...


- posted by slaughts @ 1:42 AM

 
Eastern Standard Tribe
Cory Doctorow of boingboing fame is making his just-released second novel, Eastern Standard Tribe, available for free download. Talking the talk, walking the walk.

Eastern Standard Tribe: "Here's the deal: I don't believe that there's any market-demand for teasers or for 'Digital Rights Management' technology: none of you woke up this morning and said, 'Damn, I wish there was a way I could get less of the books I enjoy and a way I could do less with them once I have them.' "



You can also buy a paper version, too. (I heartily endorse both his first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kindom, and his short story collection, A Place So Foreign and Eight More.)
- posted by slaughts @ 12:36 AM

 
Some Casual Menckening...
Reading The Skeptic, a biography of H.L. Mencken, and enjoying it thoroughly.



Scoured from the Web... some classic Menckenisms...

Democracy is the theory that holds that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.

Nature abhors a moron.

Jury - A group of 12 people, who, having lied to the judge about their health, hearing, and business engagements, have failed to fool him.

Dachshund - A half-a-dog high and a dog-and-a-half long.

No one in this world, so far as I know ... has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people.
Notes on journalism, Chicago Tribune, [19 September 1926]

The iconoclast proves enough when he proves by his blasphemy that this or that idol is defectively convincing - that at least one visitor to the shrine is left full of doubts. The liberation of the human mind has been best furthered by gay fellows who heaved dead cats into sanctuaries and then went roistering down the highways of the world, proving to all men that doubt, after all, was safe - that the god in the sanctuary was a fraud. One horse-laugh is worth ten-thousand syllogisms.

A newspaper is a device for making the ignorant more ignorant and the crazy crazier.

Conscience is the inner voice that warns us that someone may be looking.

Puritanism - The haunting fear that someone, somewhere may be happy.

Injustice is relatively easy to bear; what stings is justice.

I believe it is better to tell the truth than to lie. I believe that it is better to be free than to be a slave. And I believe that it is better to know than to be ignorant.
- posted by slaughts @ 12:49 AM