the Common Place

By special request - a post today for Chris of the underverse. He’ll understand the oblique reference , I think. Video by legendary Soviet/perestroika band Aquarium. English translation courtesy of Anti-War Songs

Thus queried my life partner, the Bicycle Repairman, this morning as I was unglueing my eyelids over my first cuppa.

I guessed Douglas Adams*, wrongly. Actually it was Stephen Fry (Jeeves & Wooster, A Bit of Fry & Laurie, The Ode Less Travelled, &c &c.)

Mr. Stephen Fry continues to obsess about technology and all things non-Microsoft, as well as write brilliantly and expansively about language, literature, the universe, and everything at The New Adventures of Mr. Stephen Fry.

And later today, I’m going to see his old buddy, Emma Thompson, in “Last Chance Harvey.” You see, everything really is connected.

Stephen Fry, Hugh Laurie, Paul Shearer ,Tony Slattery and Emma Thompson

* This is the answer to the question “Who bought the first Macintosh computer in the UK?”

Do you identify with a distaste/fear about sentimentality? Do you agree that, past a certain line, such distaste can turn everything arch and sneering and too ironic? Or do you have your own set of abstract questions to drive yourself nuts with?

-David Foster Wallace, (9/29/08 New Yorker)

GIN, TELEVISION, AND COGNITIVE SURPLUS: A Talk by Clay Shirky

Gin Lane and Beer Alley, 1750

Frank Gehry vs. Jane Jacobs: Atlantic Yards Project in Brooklyn

Jane Jacobs Cocktail:

Prosecco, elderflower liqueur, orange bitters, Hendrick’s gin

Jane Jacobs 101

Jane Jacobs on Library Thing

In re: Every Thing That is The Case by Chris Schoen at underverse

The Way

by William Bronk

There is the world, we say, and mean a kind
of mechanism, big machine that stands
there mornings when we come on. We check the gauge
and pull a lever we learned to pull, and wait,
and stuff comes out. We put stuff in. And wait.
Nights, we go home and rest. After a while of this,
we stop; and, mornings, someone else comes on.

This is the way we made to look at things.
The way is always there, you can bank on that,
though the flow of the slot is fuller here or there
or it dwindles away. We scheme then, over moves
to make more stuff come out, or a trick technique
to overlay whole sections like a new
machine, devise a way: it works somehow.

These changes are written down: what ones were made
and who served where and when - how many days.
It makes it seem more real except that real
is what it doesn’t seem at all: the skips
at night, the end a blank. What went wrong?
It isn’t the way things are, but only a way
we made to look at things, among various ways.

It has rewards: the pellets of food we get
are the soothing boon of problems solved
because they were solvable. We grasp at that.
We wish it might be so who sleep and die
- do what we call those names, not knowing what
we do, yet wanting a life outside the one
that sleeping drifts towards, death illuminates.

From Life Supports: New and Collected Poems

More William Bronk:

Poetry Magazine

Bio on AmericaPoems.com

8mm film clips from the ’30’s and 40’s of the horses on my grandfather’s farmstead in southern Minnesota. Grandpa was not a touchy-feely kind of guy so that last kiss on the nose says a lot.

I spent some time last week fighting off a hack attack on a client’s Wordpress blog. The site was running an old version of wordpress, and basically what the hacker did was upload a new wp-config file to the uploads folder. This vulnerability allowed the hacker to post thousands of links to what appeared to be zombified blogs generating posts with links to websites selling cheap prescription drugs.

I’ve learned much more than I want to know about hijacking Wordpress blogs: apparently it is now the technique of choice for black hat SEO. Now I’m seeing zombie blogs everywhere on google. I assume they dominate the long tail of search results - mostly you notice them when you search some rare term with less than a page of results. For instance, I came across the misspelling “jaundist” as in “I take a jaundist view of this.” I was interested to know whether this was an eggcorn rather than just a misspelling - I imagined someone imagining the “jaundists” as the followers of some French intellectual with a jaded, blasé outlook on life - so I googled it.

Anyway, the term “jaundist” led me to a blog with a plausible url consisting of nothing but scraped, scrambled, and badly machine-translated text, all food-related. (Possibly why I clicked, I love me some foodie porn.) Anyway I like random patterns and nonsense and nuggets of wisdom such as “Jaundist and randomness which can be misunderstood as sillyness is not good toast” and “Dwarvish bums smell awful more than daffodils in october leaking many little wet porridge flavoured weasels dipped in treakle and cream with hundreds of sprinkles” please me inordinately.

Also, some recipes (from the German, via Babelfish or similar):

1 1 / 2 times the amount of chocolate cake recipe floor
1 glass cherries
2 tsp agar-agar
Pk 2 (600ml) aufschlagbare soya cream
2 Pk Sahnesteif
1 cocoa heated swimming EL

* The cake-floor platform in the form of a spring bake on a cake and allow to cool grid with a long knife to cut into 3 floors.
* The cherries (12-16 not crushed prior to the side) with juice in a pot to boil.
* Agar-agar with a little touch cold water, to the cherries, and boil 1-2 minutes kocheln.
* Cherry mass to cool until it begins to gel.
* To the lowest floor, cake-cake ring put the cherry on mass.
* If the cherries are quite firmly become the second floor of cake to the fact very cool.
* The cream with the Sahnesteif detail.
* The cake ring from cake and remove about 1 / 3 of cream pie on the second floor.
* Third gates lay on top floor, the remaining cream on top of the page and distribute.
* The previous cherries in a circle on the cake distribute.
* Cocoa with the help of a fine Siebs sprinkle on the cake.
* Up to be eaten cold.

Decorate with chopped Spam!

Spam and aufschlagbare soya cream- two great tastes that taste great together! Also, click here for another great recipe: Fluffy Mackerel Pudding!

I’m a sucker for them.

electrical apocalypse by melissamaples

H5N1 relapse by wishy

Streetcleaner, Čečovje, Ravne na Koroškem (Slovenija) by r.marin

more: Textures and Layers Group on Flickr

one of my own recent efforts can be seen here.

Ludo pastes his visions of nature mutating in self-defense on the walls and doorways of Paris:

via PSFK

Conversation on the way to the first day of Celtic Music Camp up in the redwoods:

“I wonder if the other kids have names for their instruments.”

“I wonder too. What’s your harp named again?”

“Jasper Moon.”

“Oh yeah, I forgot it’s a boy.”

“Yes, but he’s gay. “

One of the biggest events in her social circle last spring was the wedding of a violin and a cello. Whatever is going on, at least it doesn’t involve Miley Cyrus, and that’s got to be good, no?