[dovate.com] » 2007 » November
For years I’ve waited for the day when I can pronounce the revelation of a miracle. This morning in the shower, I knew that day had arrived.
It started like any other shower, with the washing and the scrubbing and the standing there trying to wake up. I was in there for 10 minutes, thinking of coffee and trying to force that horrible Jennifer Lopez song from the Rhapsody commercial out of my head, when I spotted it.
There on my shower curtain was the apparition of Edgar Allen Poe. He was clear as the morning itself.
Poe is one of my favorite writers and I’m honored by his appearance. I don’t know why he chose today for his return to Philadelphia, or why he wants to watch me shower, but I’m grateful that he’s there.
*postscript: After a period of deep consultation, I’ve decided that Edgar Allen Poe has appeared to me in order to bear a message of great import: It’s time to clean my shower curtain. I plan to heed his warning on Sunday afternoon.
In my own defense, but for a thin band of Poe birthing mold, my shower curtain is clean and sanitary.
Long ago I made a choice. It was 1991 and I was in the 7th grade at J.R. Masterman middle school in center city Philadelphia. My parents had just purchased a state of the art home computer from Microcenter in Saint Davids PA. They put that computer in my room. It was a 486SX, 25MHZ powerhouse with a respectable 100 megabyte hard drive and a blazing 2400 bps modem. Within a year I got in trouble for linking up to some pre-internet ‘site’ in California while I downloaded an animated thing of a woman lying on a bearskin rug, touching herself provocatively. It was a 6 or 7 frame, low resolution image file and it took about 6 hours of long distance connectivity to transfer.
Before me were 2 paths. All of my friends were already losers, but some of them were also geeks. Some were even programmers. Most read sci-fi. Some collected trains. Occasionally the best of us kissed a girl. Through the 5th grade I was a blossoming nerd, but when I entered the age of self-consciousness, the whole appeal of the lifestyle started to wear away.
I could have continued on the nerd path. If I had, I would likely own a swanky ass condo and earn at minimum, 3x what I do now. Instead I grew out my hair. I really, really wanted to kiss a girl. It worked and by age 16 I was cool.
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>>> Here’s a really good side story that shows you what I was up against:
It was the sock hop in 7th grade. It was my first dance and I was scared as shit. Once I got to the gym: shoes off, socks out and saw that all the boys were on the north side of the gym, with all the girls clustered on the south, I started to feel better. I stood alone with the rest of the boys; even the cool ones.
But way over on the west end were 2 of Masterman’s biggest nerds. I don’t know what triggered it, but one of them, feeling the ostracization of total isolation just lost it. He attacked the other nerd in an uncontrolled flailing rage. The other nerd tried to stay above it all and pretended to keep reading through the beating. A punch knocked his glasses off and the illusion that he was actually reading was shattered.
The rest of us lost it. Those nerds exorcised the tension that the rest of us were feeling. There weren’t may fights at Masterman and these were 2 of the most unlikely combatants. It was the pressure. We were all under it, but they were at the bottom. It was just too much.
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But anyway, over the next 6 years I fell farther and farther from my nerd roots. By senior year in high school I cut my hair short, started hanging out in the M.G. room and even made honor roll again, but the damage had already been done. Habits forged and tastes acquired put me on my path.
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Through it all, I remain a demi-geek. While I never took that new computer and became a programmer, I did become a competent novice. I learned the basics of web design. I can write html and css and work with existing php. Mostly I can manipulate shit that already exists. This site is nothing more than a series of modified templates and reworked hacks and plugins. I browse the code in dreamweaver and eventually make it do what I want it to. I can’t write it from scratch.
I still watch Star Trek (original, TNG, DS9) and read science fiction. I studied the original Mr. Bungle in college. My eyes don’t glaze over for a whole 10 minutes when someone expounds on the virtues of the VI text editor. I can talk some of the talk, but I can’t walk the walk. I sort of follow along and pick things up on the way.
But all this is way more about myself than I meant to get into. What this post is really about is the launch of:
What is it? It’s the Philadelphia areas newest and only site devoted to and written for an audience of geeks. I’ve been asked to write for this site and if I can find any time between my job(s) and if I can tug at my roots enough to create worthy content for it, I just might. Either way, check it out. It’s new, it’s here so read it. If you’ve read this far, I know you want to.
That’s all for now.
It’s no secret that Jewish people are obsessed with nazis. Just look a those google trend stats I posted the other day. Now while I’m only half Jewish and never grew up doing all the Jewish things that all the real Jewish kids did, I have absorbed a nice chunk of the cultural trappings.
Aside from my cultural heritage, I was also a student of history and am endlessly fascinated with general cultural observation. Put all these things together and this Calvin College web archive of nazi propaganda, spanning the rise and fall of the third reich is incredibly interesting to me. For example, the photo at the top of this post is a Holiday card featuring Hitler and a tinsel laden Christmas tree. (I bet Hitler would be so mad if he knew some half-breed was referring to it as a ‘holiday’ card.)
But anyway, after scanning a couple dozen articles, I have to say that the nazi party really had something against the Jewish people. They blamed them for absolutely everything.
Also, for all those who think that the U.S. now is like nazi Germany, all I have to say is that our propaganda is completely different. All in all, (the description of Liberalism and not the racially motivated, nefarious Jewish causes of it) are more in line with a 1943 SS pamphlet on “racial policy” which read:
The French Revolution (1789) introduced Europe to a new guiding idea, summarized in the phrase “Freedom, Equality, Brotherhood.” It was an uprising of racially inferior elements who took over ideas that in part had entirely different racial origins, and could only be perverted by them. The Jews had a decisive influence. Like the Church, liberalism taught that all people were equal, that there were no value differences between the races, that external differences (e.g., body type, skin color) were unimportant. Each person, regardless of race, might be a hero or a coward, an idealist or a materialist, creative or useless to society, militarily able, scientifically able, artistically gifted. The environment and education were the important elements that made men good and valuable. If one provided the proper environment and freed people from their chains, the peoples would join to develop their abilities in a unified humanity, and eternal peace would result. Therefore liberalism demanded equality for all, the same opportunities for everyone, in particular the Jews, equality and freedom in the economic sphere, etc.
That quote pretty well sums up the whole nazi thing. Race is king, they are the master race, Jews are the root of all evil and everyone else is wrong. Happy Holidays!
I was recently brought a tasty snack food directly from Mumbai. With over a billion people, India is a crazy place. I guess it’s some sort of cultural standard that seems foreign to me as a U.S. American, but I still think they’re soylent green style snack foods are a little weird. Strange or not, I cracked the bag during the Eagles game, just to see what people tasted like. It turns out they taste like spicy peanuts, pecans and little crunchy things. All in all, people are pretty good and I could see human based products doing well here in the states.
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I need a buffer post between yesterday and today, so here’s another haunting photo. I don’t know the story behind it, but I assume it’s from WWI.
The photo:
A starving Sudanese girl who collapsed on her way to a feeding center while a vulture waited nearby. Won the Pulitzer Prize, 1994.
The photographer:
Kevin Carter. On another set of photographs was quoted: “I was appalled at what they were doing. I was appalled at what I was doing. But then people started talking about those pictures… then I felt that maybe my actions hadn’t been at all bad. Being a witness to something this horrible wasn’t necessarily such a bad thing to do.”
Criticism:
“The man adjusting his lens to take just the right frame of her suffering might just as well be a predator, another vulture on the scene.”
In his suicide note, 13 months later:
“I’m really, really sorry… The pain of life overrides the joy to the point that joy does not exist… I am haunted by the vivid memories of killings & corpses & anger & pain . . . of starving or wounded children, of trigger-happy madmen, often police, of killer executioners . . . ”
Comment:
The photo makes us all witnesses and vultures aren’t predators.
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The Good:
While driving to Maryland this Thanksgiving, I decided to stop at the rest areas that my bladder schedule usually compels me to pass over. That meant an early stop just south of Wilmington Delaware. Why this change of routine? Because I knew I’d find this:
For anyone out there who might possibly care in any way about this, this Delaware tile appears identical to a tile found 25 miles south at the Chesapeake House rest area.
The Bad:
I also stopped in Aberdeen and Edgewood, MD to see the tiles reported in those towns. Unfortunately, not visiting the Edgewood tile in the year that we’ve known of its importance has proven to be the greatest blunder in the history of tile science.
Route 40 through Edgewood has been completely repaved in the last few weeks. The construction signs are still up and traffic cones still abut the shoulder. The repaving is still warm. Lines haven’t even been painted into the crosswalks. At any rate, the tile is gone.
But why was this tile so important? A year ago, I contacted the man who originally reported it to Toynbee.net, and he was nice enough to send me some fresh pictures. Here’s the tile as it appeared in October of 2006:
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What’s so important, is that the message in the subtext most likely read: “Work for the holocaust of media.” (remember that the tiler often split words across 2 lines… for example the word Tile is split into T-ile on the Delaware rest area tile. In this case the word Holocaust, was split into Ho-locaust)
But you can’t quite tell because of damage and because of that bit of tar that never wore off the top of the tile.
The “holocaust of media” message has only ever appeared on “copycat” tiles. The Edgewood tile was 10 years old and clearly old school. If it could be proven that this tile had that message, the final nail in the single vs. copycat tiler could finally have been driven into that stubborn-ass coffin.
Even Justin Duerr, who wasn’t swayed to the single tiler theory by the recent appearance of 8 old-school tiles in center city Philadelphia wrote: “If the Edgewood tile turns out to say “holocaust of media”, I’ll be swayed…!”
Unfortunately, now we’ll never know. To add insult to injury, the Aberdeen tile is also gone. No photos exist.
The Ugly:
My tile sense kicked in at the “Maryland House” rest area and I was led to this tile fragment in their southern lot. I’m convinced that there’s a second tile at this rest area, but I couldn’t find it on this trip.
And the rest:
In other news, new tiles have appeared on City Ave. on the western edge of the city and on Route 1 up in the great Northeast. This photo from City Ave. was contributed by board member jp215:
I just discovered google search trends and I love it. While I’m not a sociologist, the assumed insights and questions raised by the raw data are incredibly valuable. But first, what is google search trends? It’s a graphical presentation of popular search terms, plotted over time. It throws in a couple other helpful bits of geographical information, but that’s about it.
After a few minutes of random searches, I decided to plod through trends in modern racism. Probably because of turning opinion about the Iraq war feeding into the need for conspiracy theories, there appeared to be a huge spike in anti-semitism in 2004. Look at the graphs for ‘jew’ and ‘protocols of the elders of zion’ during that time:
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But then again, look at the top 10 cities that searched for the word ‘jew’ in 2004:
1. New York, NY, USA
2. Petah Tiqwa, Israel
3. Philadelphia, PA, USA
4. Los Angeles, CA, USA
5. San Francisco, CA, USA
6. Miami, FL, USA
7. Chicago, IL, USA
8. Washington, DC, USA
9. Boston, MA, USA
10. Atlanta, GA, USA
In case you’re unfamiliar with the shaking out of the whole diaspora, almost all of those cities have very large Jewish populations. So is it Jewish people who are obsessed with these search terms? Although data for 2004 specifically isn’t available, you see the same general results with the ‘protocols’ search. The exception with that search result is a huge popularity of the protocols in Australia. With only 5% of the world’s Jewish population in that country, maybe there’s some real hate in that result. Or maybe not. Like I said, I’m not a sociologist.
In other news, “2 girls 1 cup” peaked and is in decline (thank god) while “Paris Hilton” - who hit her undeniable peak of internet buzz with the release of her 2004 sex tape - has struggled since then, and is beginning to taper off completely. Don’t believe me? Here’s the proof:
Or maybe I’m just reading the data optimistically.
PHILADELPHIA - Coupled with his contentious stop-and-frisk policy, Michael Nutter’s appointment of controversial Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey has already raised alarm bells among local Civil Rights groups. Organizations such as the ACLU have questioned the constitutionality of Nutter’s anti-crime tactics and have also raised concerns about Ramsey’s record as Police Commissioner in Washington D.C. This morning’s press conference - in which Nutter endorsed reclassification of street crime as urban terrorism - has turned the hot button issue into a three alarm fire.
“These people are terrorizing our communities and should be treated as such. They are terrorists.” Nutter stated.
The new wording will have significant implications for the legal rights of accused criminals. “The reclassification goes far deeper than semantics,” noted Temple University criminologist Harriet Cole. “The accused will no longer enjoy the legal rights guaranteed by the Constitution of the United States.”
“Water Boarding? Next person that takes a shot at a cop, I’ll water board them myself.” Nutter responded angrily to a flustered Rene Chenault-Fattah. “Tell your husband to repeal the Patriot Act and then I’ll talk to you about this.”
In addition to the verbal assaults from the next mayor, local news stations have accused Nutter of trying to shut them down.
“We must declare a state of emergency in Philadelphia. I said that in my campaign and I meant it. Now this isn’t Pakistan and I can’t force local news to stop broadcasting. I can however give Comcast an additional 10-year tax abatement on that new tower if they agree to stop running local news.” Nutter said with a smile and a wink.
Late yesterday Comcast announced that ABC, NBC, CBS and FOX will begin airing the City Hall channel during time slots previously reserved for local news. “There is absolutely no connection to the Mayor’s office,” stated a press release from Comcast Corp.
The Mayor-elect is also reportedly working with Greyhound on a rendition program for accused terrorists. “He’s had conversations with Greyhound executives” reported political watchdog Chuck at the popular blog Phillyistheshit.org. “He’s planning on bussing these people to states where torture is already legal, like New Jersey and Delaware. He knows full well what will happen to them in a Wilmington prison.”
While Nutter’s tactics have been enormously popular among the majority of posters at the phillyblog messageboard, some voiced reservations. “This isn’t the mayor I thought I was voting for” posted BaltimoreAve48.
Nutter seemed unfazed by critics, ending his press conference with a reference to another controversial mayor, “I’m gonna make Frank Rizzo look like a faggot.”
Aside from the crime and the deep rooted inferiority complex, there are 3 huge problems with Philadelphia. I’m sorry if this list feeds into that inferiority complex, but these are 3 simple things that New York happens to do well that Philly just doesn’t seem to understand.
1. Pizza: What the fuck? We’re less than 100 miles away from the best pizza outside of Naples, so why is it so god damn hard to get a good slice in Philadelphia? You can’t get a bad slice in New York and New Jersey. You’re lucky if you find mediocre pizza at 90% of the places here. While that means that 10% of our pizza is actually passable or even excellent, that 10% is only a tiny slice of the pie. (haha) That every bad pizza place isn’t swiftly and decisively driven out of business by the fact that their pizza is horrible, reflects very poorly on our civic character. Being so close to NY & NJ, we have no excuse.
2. Falafel: Again. Same exact story as pizza, only the field of players is a whole lot smaller. Every time a new falafel place opens, I get excited… until I try it. Disappointments, all of them. I’m talking Israeli style pocket pita falafel with a little salad bar, not roll up Lebanese/Syrian or whatever style. The options are few and decent, but all far from excellent.
For roll up style, there are a couple of standouts. In a class by itself is that batshit crazy guy at 20th and Market. Delicious. Unparalleled. Outstanding. Also good is the truck at 38th and Walnut in the shadow of the Wharton Death Star. There are a few other places worth mentioning, but with the exception of 20th and Market guy, nothing is really that good.
3. Bagels: I have never, ever had anything close to a good bagel in Philadelphia. If someone out there could swing a daily delivery fresh from Brooklyn, or god forbid learn how to make a decent bagel in Philly, they’d make a killing. The hole in the market is… nevermind, one bad pun is already one too many.
But anyway, the bagels here are an embarrassment. Every option is just a bunch of common bread unfit for smoked salmon or whitefish.
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In closing, if Philly could pull these 3 things together… I guess I’d just be slightly happier, but in the end it wouldn’t affect me all that much. All in all, well yeah… nevermind.
That’s a real photo of Saturn there. The Cassini spacecraft got this shot by putting Saturn between it and the sun. Gorgeous. Now for the first time, that same Cassini spacecraft has recorded and returned music from the homeland of Sun Ra. As the Wired blog notes:
NASA recently published several audio recordings collected during the Cassini-Huygens space probe’s exploration of the Saturnian system, and it couldn’t sound more like a theremin-laden soundtrack to a 2001: A Space Odyssey… Saturn is a source of intense radio emissions that are generated along with the auroras of the planet’s poles — similar to Earth’s northern and southern lights.
Full story and link to Saturn’s music are here.
Earlier this month, I discovered that the photo I took for this season’s PCVB cover didn’t actually end up on the cover. I never found out why, but it didn’t. Since it was a photo of a painting, I wasn’t all that devastated.
As a consolation, a much cooler photo ended up on the cover of a much cooler publication. Now while it’s no free pamphlet put out by the visitors and convention bureau, it is some matter of pride that my shots of the band Seizure 17 are featured on the cover and throughout the pages of this months free music pamphlet, the Local Music Compendium. That’s 2 low budget DIY local music ‘magazines’ that have featured my band shots. Sweet. It’s also possible that these same shots will be featured on a popular television show about a month from now… but more on that later.
If this impresses you little, I should have photos in the Philadelphia Business Journal sometime this week. Still not impressed? Later this month, I’ll have photo credit in a coffee table book of… photography. While my contributions are extremely ancillary, it’s still pretty neat.
While I’m publicly padding my online resume here, I’d also like to set the record straight on something. Earlier this year, my place of employment was featured in Time Magazine. Time.com also ran an online slideshow of the things that my place of employment produces. (I don’t want to be too specific, because when I name my place of employment or certain people who work there, it sets off everyone’s google alerts and I have to hear about my website from all my colleagues)
But anyway, image number 17 on Time’s website is mine. It’s credited to someone else. I don’t care that much, because the photo was taken in poor conditions for archival purposes. If I knew it was going to end up where it did, I would have paid closer attention to the whole process of making it. How do these things work? Can I put Time.com on my resume? It is my photo.
If none of these things impress you, then screw you. My photo career is out of its infancy and bobbling around on 2 feet for the first time. It’s past the point of being able to support itself and is beginning to help itself grow on its own. For now, I have to get to work post processing some… photos.
Sometimes it’s helpful to imagine humans as you’d imagine any large, biologically driven teeming mass of life. Strike out the idea of the individual and see humans as ants, bees, or bacteria. Look at the macro patterns, the things that drive our populations, the behavior that we can’t break down into actions of singular personalities.
Even from 100 feet, we appear as strange little tumors with spindly protrusions for arms, legs and fingers. From farther out, we multiply like bacteria in an open wound. Cities grow and swell. Every day they hemorrhage trillions of tons of sludge and waste. In the past hundred years, earth lit up like a magnesium fire. A time-lapse view from space would see the planet flaring up as we consume the planet’s buried energy. As our civilizations rise and fall, that light will peak, flicker and diminish.
Or maybe I’m being pessimistic.
For now, look at earth at night. Those lights are made possible by petroleum. The power plants that make them, the people fed by the crops grown by it and the trade networks dependent on it. Looking at this map, ask yourself which countries have the most to lose? Which have the most to gain? Who is the most powerful and who doesn’t have a leg to stand on? A basic familiarity of world politics and a thoughtful study of this map are worth as much as a year of political science classes.
What will happen in the next 100 years? The petroleum fires will go out, but will anything replace them?
The only deserts that are full of light are in the Middle East and the American Southwest. Which one will stay lit or will they both go out? Really think about it. Can the United States really afford to light its deserts? What sacrifices have we made to ensure that we can? What foreign policy decisions? How far overextended are we? Is the war in Iraq motivated by a growing desperation? Are we really that weak? Aside from oil entirely, Phoenix, Las Vegas, Reno, don’t have enough water for the next 100 years. We’re living off of others’ credit. Outside of military power and the hegemony of the dollar, we produce almost nothing. The dollar is falling out of style and our military can be defeated.
I know I’m being pessimistic, but what will this map look like in 100 years?
They say more than 100,000 motorcycles show up to the annual Toys For Tots bike ride. The bikes ride thick from Delaware Ave to Children’s Hospital. It takes an hour for them to pass. By my calculations and observations, there are way, way less than 100k, but it’s still a lot of bikes. Here are some photos:
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For some reason India has all the best stories. Take this 8-limbed baby for example.
That’s really all I have to say.
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If she weren’t so cute, I’d be a little more freaked out. Here’s the rest of the story.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, 75% of my search hits are porn related. The thing is, I get the really, really freaky shit. As always, this months search awards are heavy on bizarre fetishes. I’ve filtered out the racist and child porn related search hits and left nothing but the the alien-fucking, pigeon anus searching crème de la crème. All that and the usual top 30 bizarre search hits from the past month are listed here:
30. amish goth
29. naked porn
28. 20lb booty
27. alien fuck human female
26. is fucking a dog safe
25. intercourse of pennies and vagina
24. will an electronic rodent repeller bother my rabbit
23. video of recent possible bigfoot sighting in pa
22. big bird piss christ hillary
21. the evolution of underwear
20. soldier underwear
19. facts and pictires of baby dung beetles
18. jim morrison defecating
17. penis documentary
16. christopher walken pumpkin stencil
15. goose anus
14. pigeon human anus
13. emo suicide correlation
12. sell frozen cum
11. prog cock
10. caught my dad mastrubating
9. i saw my 13 yr old ejaculate
8. unaligned dragon
7. dovate medical side affects
6. how many people goes through the tollbooth on the benjamin franklin bridge
5. billy pilgrim diagnosis
4. difference between mummer and mutter
3. can african elephants camouflage themselves
2. what should be the minimum size of a men pennis to have sex with women?
1. porn apes
I’ve decided that I should bring a more serious dialogue to this website. Today I’ll level damning accusations at Whole Foods, accusing them of being a racist organization that promotes a fierce white supremacist ideology. My evidence?
Yesterday after work I stopped by the Fairmount Whole Foods to pick up a few items for my high fat, dairy and fiber rich, evil liberal diet. Things like plain kefir, organic milk, French and British cheeses and dry black beans.* But with winter approaching, there was one other purchase I wanted to make: Cream of Wheat cereal.
I expected Whole Foods to offer some alternative brand of wheat cereal… something in a brown box made with organic wheat on some ecologically sustainable farm in Wisconsin, but to my surprise, they only offered that in Buckwheat. The only regular wheat option was Farina.
Farina is advertised with the image of a smiling Aryan child, while the Cream of Wheat model was Caribbean born immigrant of African descent: Frank White. Why wouldn’t Whole Foods offer wheat cereals with a diversity of offensive racial stereotypes? Why the smiling Hitler youth and not the benevolent servant? Shocked and outraged, I bought Farina.
I had some this morning. It was pretty good and tasted exactly like Cream of Wheat. That’s all for now.
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* Just in case you’re confused where the line between truth and satire begins, these were my actual purchases.
I don’t write about politics much. It’s mostly because as someone who chose history as a college major, I’ve got this arrogant, jaded perspective on things. This is what I’m talking about:
On April 17, Michael Scheur, the designer and manager of the United States’ rendition program and the chief of the CIA’s “bin Laden” unit in the Clinton Administration testified before the House of Representatives. Scheur, who is no friend to any political party noted:
“I know there was much more consideration under Bush about how to handle these people (them) than under Clinton, sir, when we joked about what would happen to them in Egyptian prisons.”
So what does this mean? It means that in the big picture, the Bush administrations most disgraceful act isn’t rendition and torture, it’s the legitimization of it… publicly. Not to discount the power of legitimization, it has a tremendous existential affect on our national identity. I’m sure historians will study its consequences for generations.
A long time after taking this photo, my feelings for it have changed a lot.
