May 2011
Sometime before Christmas, I started hearing weird noises in my bathroom. As I’m taking a dump, I hear this weird, otherwordly sound emanate from somewhere around, possibly above me. Is this like that ghost in Harry Potter that comes out of the toilet, I wonder. Is this a being from another plane of existence? I don’t believe in ghosts. I don’t believe in other planes of...
Mladic in the Dock-At Last →
This will receive nowhere near the attention Osama’s death received, but that’s a shame. Yesterday, Ratko Mladić, murderer of 8,000 innocents, was taken—alive—by Serbian security forces. Mladić was, along with Radovan Karadžić (who was arrested in 2008 after having been on the run for a decade under a false identity as a “quantum doctor”), the mastermind behind...
Week 20
I have for some time been suffering from the mental illness called euthymia. That it is an illness at all is, of course, a conceit of the Cult of Happiness. It is nothing more or less than the psychological baseline: the normal, non-depressed, non-euphoric, non-psychotic state of mind. It is an illness insofar as it does not entail the prolonged happiness that Western society in general and...
How to spot a psychopath →
“So I hear you faked your way in here,” I said.
“That’s exactly right,” Tony said. (…)
“I volunteered to weed the hospital garden. But they saw how well behaved I was and decided it meant I could behave well only in the environment of a psychiatric hospital and it proved I was mad.”
I glanced suspiciously at Tony. I instinctively didn’t...
“On the metro, I have to ask a young woman to move the packages beside her to...”
– C. K. Williams, On the Metro. (found here)
No one’s death is truly about themselves. After the physical event of death, which is about no one but oneself, there comes the social event of death, which is about no one except the living. And the living will see a death as it relates to themselves as much as they will see it as it relates to the life that preceded it. Nowhere is this more apparent than when the death is of a public...
“I would like to make poems out of real objects. The lemon to be a lemon that the...”
– Jack Spicer, from After Lorca.
This is me pushing buttons on a keyboard, just...
Rocket science and brain surgery are impressive. Tapping a few keys on a keyboard or pushing a shutter button is not. Everyone can do it. It’s so easy. With modern technology, it’s pretty easy to do so in a way that produces a technically proficient result, too. Letters are easily arranged into correctly spelled words, which are easily arranged into grammatical sentences. Pixels are...
Week 18
Thought experiment: imagine a world in which the inverse of the 9/11 conspiracy theories is true. A world in which the planes fly into the twin towers and they come crashing down, like they did, but the US government by some combination of extreme luck and cunning deceives everyone, pretending it wasn’t a terrorist attack, but an unfortunate accident. Everyone buys this explanation, for some...
A few things I've learned.
My head is full of things in no particular order. I just got back from Nordic Light. I’m a month away from graduating from the Norwegian School of Photography, and I’m about to start working on my exam project where the assignment is basically “make some motherfucking art” and who the hell knows how to do that? I have no idea what I’ll be doing after June 10. Still,...
May 1, 2003: “Mission Accomplished”.
May 2, 2011: mission still not accomplished, either in Iraq or Afghanistan, but some dude who hasn’t mattered in ten years is dead.
Yay?
April 2011
Week 17
Enzymes are proteins that catalyze chemical reactions inside our cells. The traditional model for this is the “lock and key” model: the enzyme and substrate it modifies fit together like lock and key, so that there is one unique shape for each. According to an article in Nature, it turns out this is not the case with all proteins. Some are inherently disordered and, like expert...