And so though fweete Y haf been bytten by the vypr and now my hyaert turnd greene. Yt myt haf been wonderfull thiff hard case oft worn, thefe lips nown as thine, exept for the esoteryc maladeis of the flesh, how burdonsomme, how unkynde. The mappe Y draw to thee ys lyk a mappe of my own hart, though stagge and horn collyde, all ventrycles and photographyc, vayns most vayn and darke besyde. “Wayt for me.” he said, one hande holdyng myne. “Y cannot.” y cryd, unwylling, my voyse madde of paynt ynd turpentynne. Y ftay payned he was untrue, that Y was not ynoufe for hym, that hys luft drove hym to dysmay. Y do not fee myself in nowe, infstead Y am unglued, ynvysyble though comewat maye. Does thyse thynges contynue? Fhouldde Y ftay?
Month: January 2009
spreading the love
Canadian fetishwear designer Slinka, (an especially darling acquaintance of mine), has recently come upon a pet-related financial crisis. Her cat Pooh needs dental surgery she and her partner can’t quite afford. Thankfully you can help her by helping yourself, (if you’re the sort who’s into such things), by buying her sexy, sexy latex designs for you and/or your loved ones, just in time for Valentines:
wrath of khan, the toy opera: when pop culture hits high culture over the head with low brow awesome
ominous
Riding through Crackton this morning, there was no one on the street. It was suspicious, so suspicious, even the Theives Market was gone. The corner of Pigeon Parked looked like an abandoned movie set. Benches were not huddles of homeless, forts of shopping carts and tattered blankets, shouting about drugs, threats, or Jesus. I could see police farther down one street, bunched at the mouth of an alley, clapping their dark gloved hands together against the chill, but no other evidence of anything that could have happened. My bus went by too fast. Yesterday our regular junk strip was our regular junk strip, all howling, dirty, and dangerous for tourists. Where did everyone go?
a habit I never got into, and now the internet can do it for me
science is so groovy
Our world may be a giant hologram:
DRIVING through the countryside south of Hanover, it would be easy to miss the GEO600 experiment. From the outside, it doesn’t look much: in the corner of a field stands an assortment of boxy temporary buildings, from which two long trenches emerge, at a right angle to each other, covered with corrugated iron. Underneath the metal sheets, however, lies a detector that stretches for 600 metres.
For the past seven years, this German set-up has been looking for gravitational waves – ripples in space-time thrown off by super-dense astronomical objects such as neutron stars and black holes. GEO600 has not detected any gravitational waves so far, but it might inadvertently have made the most important discovery in physics for half a century.
For many months, the GEO600 team-members had been scratching their heads over inexplicable noise that is plaguing their giant detector. Then, out of the blue, a researcher approached them with an explanation. In fact, he had even predicted the noise before he knew they were detecting it. According to Craig Hogan, a physicist at the Fermilab particle physics lab in Batavia, Illinois, GEO600 has stumbled upon the fundamental limit of space-time – the point where space-time stops behaving like the smooth continuum Einstein described and instead dissolves into “grains”, just as a newspaper photograph dissolves into dots as you zoom in. “It looks like GEO600 is being buffeted by the microscopic quantum convulsions of space-time,” says Hogan.
walking out power
I’ll be what I am
This month is apparently The Month Of The House-Guest. Not only has Will moved into our library until February with his sweet, darling cat who continues to hiss at my sweet, darling cats, Christopher and Jordan just spent the weekend, now Nate is over, soon be followed by Tony.
This, my friends, is fabulous.
I like having company over. According to me, it doesn’t happen enough. (David, on the other hand, has completely given up on keeping anyone’s names straight.) Most days my social life lives in a strange limbo, caught between the hundreds of local people I know, but barely see, and the few on-line friends I talk to almost daily, but have mostly never met. House guests bridge the gap nicely. It’s a Win Win situation. Not only do they get me out to fun restaurants and the aforementioned terribly neglected locals, they also continue to fortify my belief that my friends-who-happen-to-live-far-away and ‘internet friends’, a term that does no one a good deed, are not in fact baby eating basement dwellers who shower once a month and brush their teeth with blood. (A possibility that, in spite of the media, I refuse to worry about, as proved by my utter and complete willingness to come sleep on your couch.)
So, that said – if you’re coming to Vancouver, make sure to drop me a line. If you don’t mind cats, it’s very likely you’ve got a place to stay.
click the link to look and see how much of the world was watching
Spectators in Times Square watch President Barack Obama take the oath of office during his inauguration
Residents of Kibera, one of the poorest quarters in Nairobi gather to watch the inauguration ceremony
President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama attend the Neighborhood Inaugural Ball at the Washington Convention Center
Guests at the “Biden Home States Ball” record the moment as President Barack Obama and first lady Michelle Obama dance
EAT NOT EAT
I don’t know Stu Nathan and it’s very likely that neither do you, (unless you are either Budgie Barnett who has just come out with a new book of quickfic that’s quite lovely, yes you should buy it, where you ask, why right here or Alasdair Watson of They Fight Crime.) I don’t know what he looks like, where he lives, or why he keeps a journal. If we were to meet by chance in the street, I would not recognize him. The only reason I know his name is Stu, even, is because it says so right there on his userinfo. He is a complete and utter stranger.
Why should you care? Because you should friend him. In among his regular blogging activities, he writes incredible character pieces about his fellow passengers on London transit, who he calls Tube People. Sometimes amusing, occasionally sobering, they are perpetually excellent and well worth your time.
A satisfying excerpt from a recent post:
“They clearly don’t know each other, but they have two things in common — age and class. Bundled up against the cold in overcoats and scarves, the gentleman wears an old-fashioned check cap and the lady has a cosy headscarf. He holds her arm as they board the train in the windy West London no-mans-land on the way to Heathrow, but she’s supporting him as much as she supports her.
‘Oh, thank you,’ she says, in the effortlessly penetrating cut-glass tones of the truly posh. ‘Thank you so much, I was afraid I wasn’t going to get up into the carriage.’
‘That’s quite alright,’ he replies, in a voice you can imagine encouraging the troops at Arnhem. ‘No bother at all.’ But he’s red in the face and puffing, and half-falls gratefully into his seat.
They aren’t shouting, and they couldn’t be described as loud. But their voices carry around the sparsely-populated carriage as they make the sort of small-talk you might hear at a tea-dance. Faultless manners and old-school decorum, and you can see that everyone else in the carriage is paying rapt attention. Newspapers stop rustling. Pages of novels are unturned. The volume on MP3 players is surreptitiuously lowered.
‘You said you had children? A boy and a girl, wasn’t it?’ the lady asks, her head on one side, her face attentive.
‘Oh, yes,’ says the gentlemen. ‘They’re both fine and happy, grown up now of course. Jane’s doing something in social work, living near Brighton; it’s an area called Kemptown, if I’m remembering correctly.’
‘And does she have a young man?’
‘Weeeell…’ he drawls, his eyes unfocusing slightly and a wrinkle deepening between his eyes. ‘Actually, there seem to be two young men around; they have some sort of… arrangement I don’t really understand. They don’t seem to both live there all the time, but they’re both… around. But everyone seems to be happy with it, and she has one son by each of them. And it’s a terribly bohemian area.’
‘Like a village?’ she says.
‘Oh, very like. It’s not my place to question, I think?’
‘And what about your son? What does he do?’
‘Yes, he runs his own business. He was doing something in the City, but he decided to pack it in and do something he always wanted to do.’
‘And what was that?’
‘He opened a sandwich bar with his wife.’
‘A sandwich bar? It’s not one of those places where you can’t sit down, is it? I can’t abide those.’
‘No, no, there are seats, of course there are. And you can get other things as well, hot soups and so on, and I believe there are salads as well.’ This is said in the tones of a man who has heard of the concept of salad but will have no truck with the reality.
‘And it’s doing well?’
‘Yes, very well, I understand.’
‘Oh, good! That’s marvellous. I do sometimes get peckish, you know, and a well-made sandwich is very welcome. What’s the place called? Is it somewhere I could keep and eye out for?’
‘Yes, it’s called EAT, so he tells me.’
The man opposite has raised his newspaper to hide his face, and the pages start to rustle as his hands vibrate.