during the 40s and 50s, access to western music was severely restricted in eastern europe. enterprising music lovers began using wax disk cutters to record the bootlegged sounds of elvis, the beatles, thelonius monk, and john coltrane onto sheets of discarded xray film. called roentgenizdat, the dual-purpose medium allowed deprived fans to “record on the bones.” the authorities were not amused. at least seven individuals suspected of recording or distributing the bone records were tossed into gulags. collectors particularly prize government-created recordings that greeted the unsuspecting music fan with high-volume threats: “you want rock and roll? fuck you, anti-soviet slime!”

józsef hajdú, a photographer and archivist with the hungarian postal museum in budapest, has gathered a number of these haunting images.

recent archeological evidence points to a large-scale architectural wonder constructed 6000 years before stonehenge. the turkish site, gobekli tepe, is situated at the northen tip of the the fertile crescent and boasts dramatic rings of giant stone slabs not unlike those at the much more recent stonehenge. evidence suggests that the builders were well-organized hunter gatherers who had not yet begun to cultivate crops or create settlements. given that the 11,000 year-old massive complex required the coordinated efforts of hundreds of individuals to complete, gobekli tepe goes a long way toward suggesting that architecture, in fact, predates agriculture.

among bird enthusiasts, ravens have long been touted as the smartest of birds. there are a variety of proofs offered, but few are as compelling as this video of japanese ravens who’ve learned to crack many a hard nut through observation and trial-and-error. this raven video, found on the always rewarding ursi’s blog, is narrated by none other than sir david attenborough.

it’s geeky, but i love having a periodic table of the elements around for reference. there’s something about the order and logic that’s reassuring in this messy world. theodore gray spent years collecting images of each of the elements and has put together a truly gorgeous poster, showcasing each in all its photographic glory. hardcopies aren’t free, they range from $8 (10″x20″) to $45 (27″x53″), but i may just have to order one. reality checks are more important than ever.

i miss pinball. there is something about the jewel-like colors and the clanging sounds and the fact that you actually have to apply body english to rack up a decent score. so many quarters sacrificed. so little to show for it. other than fond reminisces, of course.

for others with a similar bent, photographer kevin tiell has uploaded some gorgeous photos, all taken from the ball’s eye view. check ‘em out.

haha. an old friend, tom jennings, sent a link last nite to a kinda feral something i put together in 1998 for a challenge on the nettime mailing list. the idea was to take a long list of ‘technoblather’ terms and knit them into one narrative. i made it my personal challenge to use as few other words as possible. The entry read:

The crepuscular cowboy blatherations of the crypto-fascist left and the neo-fascist right are just so much penguin dust. Face it. Complex political- cultural articulations are no more than an ideological cyberspasm. Dildonics in a drool cup!

One can invoke the multi-theater warfare and technorealistic-monotheism of Islamic fundamentalism or bemoan the pre-industrial living conditions of information debilitated third-world economies like the Zapatista internationals, but a transnational civil society spouting factoids about local specificities is no longer going to garner broad international consensus. That’s intellectually insane.

What is crystal clear is that cultural and behavioral permissivity (garbage lifestyles) of the subaltern classes leads to deterritorialization and a fundamental phase shift of global proportions. The dominant order may have relied on multinational corporations and the intermediate stratum of consumer-product distribution to impose appropriate cultural forms in the past, but today, raw domination rests with the bandwidth-intensive information-and-service economy.

Ongoing network-based discussions among the new transnational military- economic order would like to suggest that this represents a global hegemony of neoliberalism, or at best a center-left hegemony, but in truth, these circuits of international information exchange will almost certainly harbinger a hegemonic dissolution so fraught with structural unemployment and resource-extraction that the worldmind will boggle.

Our new overlords will be obscenely rich information managers, assisted by their lapdogs, the aesthetic technicians. Relying on the technoid wonders of computer-based art and insidious new information-processing technologies, they will feed us information enriched mental plutonium and we will call it manna. May the gods forgive us.

there’s something viscerally satisfying about the simplicity of the DaylightMap site. clean lines and quick response echo its google map roots. bookmark it and you’ll never call paris before dawn again. (unless you’re drunk dialling, of course.) time-travelers will appreciate that you can enter any date and any time and see which arcs of the globe were/will be in sun and which in the dark. stalkers will find the bookmarking tool handy — you can not only quickly check to see if saved locales are dark or light, you’re shown sunrise and sunset times, along with length of day.

if so, might wanna pop on over to the posthuman blues blog and see if something there doesn’t cheer you up. the brainchild of mac tonnies, it’s a grabbag of links and pithy blurbs, each a little more curious than the last. right now, there are pointers to NASA shuttle schedules, naked babe book promotion (replete with kafka references), bruce sterling’s cyberpunk reading list, the sacred teat of gaea, astrobiological imperatives, steven hawking’s call for space colonies, possible prehistoric human record of a super nova, cheap drinking water from the ocean, and an article about how coffee makes you more open-minded. check it out. i know i will be.

terri nelson works with mercury studios, a portland, oregon comics studio. it used to be that when you searched on “terri nelson mercury” her name would come up first. meanwhile, a mr. terry nelson has joined the firm of mercury/fleishman-hillard. now it wouldn’t have bothered terri nelson that another’s name now tops hers own for certain google searches, but this other terry nelson, this usurper, if you will, was bush-cheney’s former political director and would like to claim credit for the election of his clients. in response to a press release by his new firm announcing his hiring, ms. terri nelson issued her own press release. it’s well worth a read. just for the record, mr. terry nelson is now working to support john mccain’s political efforts.

if you do a search on ‘oldest living human,’ you find many contenders from many nations. few come close to cruz hernandez. a resident of san agustin, el salvador, senora hernandez was born in 1878 and today is her 128th birthday. a midwife her entire life, she didn’t retire until four years ago. the mother of thirteen children and grandmother of 60, she lives with her 80-year-old daughter, patrona. when asked the secret to her long life a few years ago, she responded that she never bathes during the new moon. also, she recommends beer and meat.

we always knew it. and now there is a papyrus manuscript copied three hundred years after jesus’ death that suggests judas iscariot was first among jesus’ apostles. in the text, jesus tells judas, ‘you will exceed all of them, for you will sacrifice the man.’

called the ‘judas text,’ the 26-page document is written in egyptian coptic and is believed to be a copy of a greek text from a century earlier. radiocarbon dating, ink analysis, and multispectral imaging overseen by national geographic all confirm the date, and ancient manuscript experts say the linguistic style and script are consistent with texts of the time.

matthew, mark, luke and john were the four gospel writers sanctioned by the early christian church, but other gospels, written by contemporaries of the new testament authors, have surfaced in recent years. Two of the most prominent are associated with Thomas and Phillip. There are even fragments from coptic papyrii from the same era attributed to Mary Magdalene.

perhaps the most important fallout of the find may be that adherents of biblical inerrancy–those who believe that every word of the bible is true and handed down by god–now have more to ponder than mere discrepancies among translations of the sanctioned texts.

south dakota governor mike rounds recently signed a draconian law making abortion virtually illegal in that state. or so he thought. happily for the women of south dakota, the chief of the oglala sioux tribe on the pine ridge reservation is cecelia fire thunder, a former nurse and healthcare giver. “it is now a question of sovereignty,” the chief told indianz.com. “i will personally establish a planned parenthood clinic on my own land which is within the boundaries of the pine ridge reservation where the state of south dakota has abolutely no jurisdiction.”

we applaud chief fire thunder’s brave decision. if you would like to send donations toward this effort or toward helping the tribe itself, you may address them to:
ATTN: PRESIDENT FIRE THUNDER
PO BOX 990
Martin, SD 57751

please make checks out to:OST Planned Parenthood Cecelia Fire Thunder.

we love decay. the sweet smell of rotting concrete and rusting iron.

a couple of months ago, we pointed to a breathtaking series of photos taken by brooklynite, mr. mott. Images of abandoned prisons, state hospitals and power stations evoked a serene and terrible beauty. we thought mr. mott couldn’t be beat.

but now we find the images of photographer shaun o’boyle and are happy to report that his stark photos of asylums, mines, fairgrounds and ancient chemistry labs are on a par. Often shot in black and white, and with an intimacy that almost makes you want to turn away, o’boyle salvages what he can from the detritus. we are grateful.

juan lozano is a 51-year-old family man whose love affair with personal flight began when he was nine years old and NASA showcased some daring souls wearing “rocket belts” in an exposition of space gear at a local polo ground. although he never finished high school, lozano is an accomplished inventor and designer. he claims his rocket-propelled motorcycle will go from 0 to 250 in five seconds and veterans believe his jet-propelled car may yet top the world speed record. but it is his hydrogen-peroxide-fueled jetpack that is gaining him the most attention these days. he did it all. invented and distills the fuel. built all the components. and does the testing in his backyard in cuernavaca. so far, 30-second flights are becoming regular and he’s almost ready to attempt untethered flight. we wish him well. the world could do with a few more souls who are willing to follow their obsessions. for those wishing to learn more about lozano, popular science published a lengthy article about logano and you can visit his own website, technologia aeroespacial mexicana for more information.

we know we’re on the brink of tremendous climate change. history tells us that, in fact, humanity has thrived during a relatively rare period of stable and friendly weather. we believe that our actions may well be causing the current weather changes and that’s no doubt true.

what seems less and less clear is exactly what the results of our actions will be. there’s been much talk lately among meteorologists and their fans that the global warming we are most certainly witnessing could cause the currents in the atlantic to stop circulating warm water and bring on a new ice age.

the newest climate rationale making the geek rounds holds that europe’s bubonic plague may have caused the ‘little ice age’ that lasted from roughly the 14th through 17th centuries. researchers at utrect university found changes in cereal pollen that indicated that great forests grew up in the wake of the devastation left by ‘the black death,’ soaking up carbon dioxide and causing the 300-year dip in temperatures.

damned if we do and damned if we don’t? it’s all pretty confusing. i’ve learned to trust the fine folks over at worldchanging.com to stay on top of all this. i hope they figure it all out soon. i have a spring wardrobe to plan.

whether or not cheney deigned to visit the bedside of the friend he’d just shot and whether he’s fucking some ambassador are of mild, admittedly prurient, interest to me. what is of much greater interest is cheney’s relationship with his hostess during the shoot, katherine armstrong–the reigning doyen of texas oil society–and the part she played in getting him his halliburton multimulti millions during his brief tenure as a corporate exec. this year’s oil profits alone prove he’s more than repaid the favor. also interesting is the unabashed, hands-off approach texas law enforcement agencies take with the oil royalty of their state. ‘left side of the face? right? drinking? not drinking? whatever you say, ma’am.’

one other thing that’s nagging, nagging, nagging at me is the admission in that cozy fox interview that cheney finagled declassification powers. what other powers does he have that no other vice president ever had? what part have the loyalties exposed by this little hunting accident played in recent global events? and what exchanges exactly went back and forth between the armstrong ranch and the white house during those first, long, silent hours? we’ll probably never know because the press and the democrats are too busy chasing their own behinds, bucking and braying, hoping to impress upon us their own credibility.

the bottom line is that cheney’s behaviors during quailgate only serve to exemplify his much greater sins of greed, callousness, power-mongering, and secrecy. if these larger sins aren’t what is at the heart of media discussions about the event, if there is no attempt to shine a light on the larger discrepancies, then all this blather about whether or not he sat by a bed or valentine-fucked some woman other than his wife will serve as nothing but a cheap little side show. the circus will leave town and all we’ll have left is a some cotton candy stuck between our teeth and the memory of tinny-voiced hucksters arguing about exactly how many bird shot fit on the head of a pin and we won’t even remember why we ever gave a damn.

color me cranky.

sometimes when i’m avoiding work, i do searches on the word feral. tonite, i came across feral cheryl, a dreadlocked, pierced, and tattooed doll. her australian creators say she is modelled after down-under green extremists known as ‘ferals.’ she eschews high heels, preferring to run barefoot and she comes with a small bag of, well, herbs. you can choose brown eyes or blue, but just as you’d expect of any wild child, the tattoos are unique to each doll. we like her motto: live simply, run wild.

the ratings slapped on movies seem harmless enough to many, but the truth is that filmmakers all too often self-censor in an effort to avoid certain ratings (NC-17 being the most troublesome) from the secretive and seemingly arbitrary MPAA (motion picture association of america). the members of the ratings board are anonymous, the criteria used to assign ratings unpublished, and subsequent ratings do not allow for official appeal.

there is nothing new in any of this. but a film being shown at sundance this year finally exposes the MPAA in a manner that may finally bring some much needed scrutiny. director kirby dick’s film, titled this film is not yet rated, investigates the secrecy and arbitrariness of the ratings system and through a series of interviews with filmmakers. the commentary clearly proves that independent films are regularly subjected to more stringent critieria than those of major filmmakers and that violence is given much greater leeway than sex, particularly if it involves gay or nonmainstream relationships. the film will air on the IFC channel in the fall. meanwhile, we wish the filmmakers the best of luck in winning distribution for this much needed film.

thanks to jesse james garrett for the pointer.

it was a transcendant moment. “i was completely astonished by the beauty of nature,” said albert hofmann, the man responsible for introducing lysergic acid diethylamide to the world. mr. hofmann wasn’t, as it turns out, talking about about his first acid trip, but rather describing a mystical experience he’d had as a child while walking in a swiss forest. but on a fateful afternoon in 1943, while a chemist doing research on the ergot fungus that grows on rye, hoffman accidentally ingested some of the compound. a short while later, he found himself suddenly reliving the “miraculous, powerful, unfathomable reality” that he’d experienced many years before on that alpine path.

today is hofmann’s 100th birthday. he’s still going strong. while he hasn’t visited the psychotropics in a awhile, he calls his discovery “medicine for the soul” and suggests that he might, like aldous huxley, choose to be under its influence when death seems imminent.

if you’d like to send him a birthday greeting, a special mailbox has been set up. the email address is: birthday at hofmann.org.

some believe that all tales of feral children are myth. a few turn out to be true. barely more than a toddler in his native uganda, john ssebunya watched as his father killed his mother. terrified, the child ran into a nearby forest. the area was ravaged by civil war and overrun with monkeys, who were usually kept in check by the locals who consider them vermin.

he survived by living on the periphery of bands of vervet monkeys as they scavenged the wartorn forests. vervet monkeys can be vicious but are considered one of the few species of primate that might tolerate a lone outsider. chimpanzees would, in all likelihood, have killed and eaten the child.

by the time ssebunya was discovered by tribemen, he was four or five years old. he did not rejoin the human race willingly, but over time, he not only learned to speak, but to sing. he is a now featured performer in the pearl of africa touring choir.

ssebunya still exhibits an uncanny rapport with cercopithicus aethiops monkeys, but for many years, his time with the primates was kept secret because locals found it shameful. monkeys are considered vermin and one of the worst local insults is to call someone else a ’son of a monkey.’