Thursday, October 01, 2009

Sync

Every once in awhile, someone invents a really cool watch. Unfortunately, they're seldom able to get funding to produce it. I don't blame Casio, Rolex, or the other heavyweights in the timepiece market. I blame you. You, me, and everyone else.

We've become callused to the phenomenon and are terribly out of sync, pimping the whole affair off as jewelry or a mild novelty. In medieval England, public clock workers were regularly murdered as a crude form of hitting the snooze button. The advent of the telegraph saw cities like Boston and New York synchronize their clocks (which used to be about 6 minutes different, marked by the sun's position at noon) leading to the modern atomic precision of one world, one time, one Pod. Yet there are still 12 billion wrists in this world begging for a voice in the tempest of our temporal monoglot. Enter the modern wristwatch. A fusion of form and function, a stitch across the inchoate fabric of spacetime that must look up at you with its bracing, cute puppy-dog eyes and say, It's ok, you still have 15 minutes before you're late for work.



Random floating point watch that makes a clock after you shake it. Lync




New concepts can't get funding. Thanks calculator watch geeks. Lync



The meta clock! Lync

Tuesday, September 08, 2009

Steel Velcro

Not your normal everyday Heavy Metal band but a nice step along the stairway to convenience heaven, putting us a little closer to the most important question affronting any civilization: what is the next universal fastener?

From buttons to snaps to zippers to velcro (inspired by a botanist pulling burrs off of his trousers) we might not live to see gamma ray thought clasps, but it's kinda cool to think that the last house we'll live in might be built by the same stuff we got in trouble for ripping on/off too many times in elementary school.

There's just something refreshing about the sibilant rip of velcro. Like you're really tearing the shit out of something, except without the consequences. In a way its like the virtual headspace we live in today, twittering online personalities and lifestyles which don't directly affect us. Changing FB status updates, quiz results, and cause-of-the-day bandwagons ... it's almost as if our online schizophrenia registers its bits in silent clicks that might all add up to a velcro rip at the end of our distracted existences. No swan songs for our generation. No single pathos to cling to in the age of meaningless information glut. The threnody of 21st Century Schizoid Man will sound less like King Crimson and more like Kappa.

Wednesday, August 26, 2009

Happy Virus Pencil Box



Sums up my role as an English teacher in Taiwan.

Monday, August 17, 2009

Wasted Prophet

What is it about Toby that can turn a notion into a viral antecedent that transmogrifies into its own counterpoint and then replicates yourself into its antidote from the inside-out, stochastically?  Simply put, how does Toby make us love Ween as much as he does?  I used to think it was the magnanimous embrace of his welcoming charity, hosting afterparty after party... that and his bunny, Valerie.  I mean, what could turn a funk DJ into a Ween DJ?  A house DJ into a cosmic disco Ween producer?  A turntablist into a Ween cellist?  

Love itself.  Not Toby's love for Ween but his love for you.  Whoever you are, I defy you to dodge the empathy lasers radiating out of Toby's lovely skull.  The admirable part is that he doesn't use his charisma to woo the public into mass suicide or turn us into pamphlet whores.  You'd be hard pressed to find any snake worship or meth labs round Toby.  No praise allah 17-virgin shenanigans.  No, definitely no virgins.  Toby is a wasted prophet, disproving the laws of metaphysics with his own flavor of irreverence and a penchant for hedonistic weirdness harnessed under the judicious leashes of his enlightened mind tendrils.  

Of all the existential rhetoric and misguided cult movements, none will find purchase in soil as rich as that of this dear old soul, with his feet firmly planted in the permafrost of investment banking but head adrift near the boundary where the event horizon meets the meristem of cultural ontogeny.  Modern life is perplexing and shamans are considered terrorists these days.  Yet we still search for meaning.   What is one to do when god is dead and the world explodes with distraction?  It's best to just follow the coolest banker you know.  And for this we salute you, oh brown-ed one. 

Hyperpiracy


China takes piracy to a new level.  Enter the META theft.  You can get multiple movies on a single DVD for about a dollar.  The interesting part is how someone (?) decides to aggregate the films.  I never thought you could put Dead Man Walking in the same genre as Universal Soldier (see Top Impetuosity Films).  

Thursday, July 02, 2009

Chess Monk

A guy tries to improve his chess game by joining a Buddhist monastery, hoping to escape the limitations of nirvana and apply his powers of concentration to the chess board.

He fails, ridiculously so. Early on the path to enlightenment he renounces the eternal game as a mere exercise in distraction. His heart and mind open into a world of empathy and he turns his focus on others.

Ironically the monastery is short of funds, falling prey to parasitic forces in the giant bureaucracy that are more concerned with expensive cars than karma. They set Ed on a chess quest to win prize money and influence young minds toward the monastic way of life. Ed begins winning tournaments and gaining a following.

He ultimately becomes disillusioned with the corrupt bureaucracy of the monkhood and drops out only to find his chess game suffer.


Posted with LifeCast

Saturday, December 13, 2008

ACCA (ABBA meets ACDC)


Take a Chance on Hell
For Those About to Dance (We Salute Queen)
Knowing Back Knowing Black
Dirty Mama Done Mia Cheap
Vous Shook Me All Night Long
Gimme Gimme Gimme A Bullet
Hell O. Bell
Lay All Your Love on Hell

Sunday, November 30, 2008

Non-Alcoholic Drinking Establishment: PUBE








Nojito
Masturbation On The Beach
Non-Alcoholic Whiskey
Stapler
Sans Gria
Suki
B5.2
Thomas Collins
Gym & Tonic
Hail Mary
Both Kinds of Non-Alcoholic Beer on Tap