Heavy Heavy Water

Hoss-fightin' hosses and such

2009-11-14T12:28:00.001-05:00

Role-playing game handle: Horse de combat

While the illegal sports of dogfighting and cockfighting are better known, the blood sport of horsefighting is also practiced in some parts of the Far East, despite a fair amount of outcry.
Combat by proxy is not limited to vertebrate species. There are enthusiasts of fighting crickets in China

Perhaps one could redirect this interest to virtual depictions of blood sports in the context of video games, so that actual animals would not suffer. There is already a series of Alien vs. Predator games which one could consider to be a variation on this idea, albeit one that is a little easier to market.

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Waiting to levitate

2009-11-12T16:01:00.001-05:00

Reality program: Hellholes, where contestants on a rapidly diminishing floor compete to see who can be the last one left alive while performing mental and physical challenges

via flickr.com

When people say that something "fell between the cracks" my mind rebels. Surely if a floor were cracked in certain places, the best place for something to fall would be in between the cracks, because that way the thing would not fall into a crack itself. One could say something "fell into a crack" or "fell into a space between the parts which are between the cracks."

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Fun with literal-minded electronica

2009-11-04T18:33:00.001-05:00

Song title: (1) Jammed Shredder, (2) Androids Go Diving
Suggested partway through listening to the eleventh track on this album, which was a Magnatune freebie a month back.

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Is it just me?

2009-11-02T10:11:00.003-05:00

Spider On The Track,
originally uploaded by brentbat.

Or does anyone else look at this picture and think "good heavens man, what have you been drinking?"

Autumn in upstate New York

2009-11-01T13:27:00.001-05:00

Dissertation title: She Was Like a British Romantic: Parallels between the substance inspired writing of Jack Bruce and of Thomas de Quincey

Not Bruce and Eric Clapton and Ginger Baker there on the small stage entertaining the Columbus Day weekend crowd, but an amazing simulacrum. My apologies for the shakiness of the hand held shot, as my cheap digital camera does not have anything resembling image stabilization.

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Cruel bars of gourd

2009-10-31T18:33:00.001-04:00

Domain name: punkinheadjack.com

It's quite dark out already but I'm not seeing any trick-or-treat action on our very quiet, rather safe suburban street. So I don't think Jack is in that much danger of violent liberation, out on the porch rail where he is now.

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By the light of the silvery moon

2009-10-31T07:38:00.001-04:00

Hunter's Moon,
originally uploaded by Suneet Panesar.

honeymoon cottage

we thought it was a

dog's howl

Frightful! Also, there might be a monster

2009-10-30T15:51:00.001-04:00

Book name: Neptune's Illegitimate Daughter

via britishpathe.com

Friday music! of a rather peculiar sort!
Perhaps science and technology has progressed to the point that we can settle the controversy about Loch Ness by simply creating an aquatic beast of our own and introducing it to the famous locale. We'll put whoever's responsible for this varmint in charge:

I doubt that it can be much more disruptive to the ecology than the monster-hunting robots and other seekers already clogging up the loch looking for a (presumably rather annoyed) natural sea creature.

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We'd be afraid not to give him an award

2009-10-29T07:25:00.001-04:00

Band name: Glenduff Mobile Psyops Brigade

via instructables.com

Despite the impressiveness of the armament, I think the best part is how he made the backpack with the "jet ports" out of a broken typewriter.

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Rembrandt's got nothing on me today

2009-10-27T07:40:00.001-04:00

Thoroughbred name: Non-Specular Bid

(Because of this horse)

I was at work the other day in a room with a little-used whiteboard turned to the wall and saw myself in something approaching the ultimate in soft-focus. Perhaps mirrors with the exact right degree of bumpiness could be made, scientifically, in which one sees what others see of oneself when they are completely besotted with tender emotion. Or is puppy (horsey?) love still in style?

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A mania anticipated

2009-10-26T07:38:00.001-04:00

Media sensation: Balloon Mobs

via iwantyoutowantme.org

Inspired by the hoaxers, a great many lonely Americans construct and take off in color-coded personal helium balloons (presumably wearing breathing apparatus), in search of love and community in the upper troposphere. In the process, beautiful aerial displays drift over the eastern slops of the Rockies, with a few soaring to icy dizzying heights, and a few others falling like overripe fruit down to the unforgiving Earth. Experts speculate on how the phenomenon has grown out of the increasing levels of isolation and narcissism in society coupled with worries over the H1N1 pandemic.

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Yeah, you heard me - WISDOM

2009-10-25T07:10:00.001-04:00

Traditional end of meal course: Surrealism Cookies

The other day we had to go to the phone store to replace Pam's broken handset, and when we were done we stopped at a local non-Western restaurant named after an inhabitant of the natural world. It was a nice meal, but I was stopped in my tracks when I opened my fortune cookie. It seems to have sustained translation damage in more than one place. But I think it is good when your food makes you stop and think, because that gives you three extra opportunities a day to achieve enlightenment.

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In two decades we'll know what they've done

2009-10-24T09:30:00.001-04:00

Educational video line: Baby Eisenstein

via youtube.com

The Disney company has had to eat some considerable amount of crow with regard to the Baby Einstein product line they acquired a while back, which seems not to do what it was touted as doing. All this infant video watching might have some other effect however, perhaps inspiring some to craft tightly-written family dramas, others to spectacular documentaries, and still others to agonizing historical montages we can only dream of now. Or they could grow to like CGI the way I have not.

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My question is: where did I leave the top of my skull?

2009-10-21T07:07:00.001-04:00

Horror movie title: The Previously Dead

via dreamstime.com

I have been served brains before, and enjoyed them, insofar as one can enjoy something so similar to hard-boiled egg whites without benefit of deviled egg filling. This was long before people had worries about BSE or Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease and I think I have suffered no ill effect from the experience. Nor any especially potent beneficial effect, along the lines of "the best brain food should be brains," since after all it was a matter of consuming them, not acquiring a transplant or anything.

I notice that it is possible to buy a brain hat but they really should put on a warning that it intended only for those with short or no hair, which would be bound to spoil the effect. It is just the sort of thing one might wear to see a zombie movie hoping to score a reduced price ticket.

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I don't know why he's standing there

2009-10-19T18:27:00.001-04:00

Album name: Cameleopard vs. Manatee
Spotted by the cafeteria in our office building
Which would win? Or would it even possible to imagine them fighting?
http://frabjoustimes.magahiz.com/pages/contact

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A surefire vaccine against boredom

2009-10-19T08:40:00.001-04:00

Candy name: H1-oween Shots

via luxirare.com

How cool would it be to give out treats this year in syringes for Halloween? You would even need to carry out the elaborate and somewhat tricky 'spherification' process described in this post, just have the kids line up one by one and direct the concoction straight into their greedy mouths from the nozzle of your needle-less syringe. Maybe better for a party than for trick-or-treaters at the door owing to logistics and trust factors, but we obviously have the technology.
Thanks to Holy Kaw for pointing me to this blog.

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A surefire vaccine against boredom

2009-10-19T08:38:00.001-04:00

via luxirare.com

Candy name: H1-oween Shots
How cool would it be to give out treats this year in syringes for Halloween? You would even need to carry out the elaborate and somewhat tricky 'spherification' process described in this post, just have the kids line up one by one and direct the concoction straight into their greedy mouths from the nozzle of your needle-less syringe. Maybe better for a party than for trick-or-treaters at the door owing to logistics and trust factors, but we clearly have the technology.
Thanks to Holy Kaw for pointing me to this blog.

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The terror of (nearly) lost time

2009-10-17T16:27:00.001-04:00

SF story: The Aliens Have Arrived and Are About to F*** Up All Our S***

via flickr.com

I have been thinking recently about spicing up my photographic activity by perhaps getting into the toy camera scene which relies on the Lomo, Holga, and similar inexpensive plastic cameras to come up with unusual grain and color effects, to the extent of visiting the enormous B&H photo superstore in New York city to see what they had to offer. In the end, however, I decided against picking up any more gadgetry and have turned toward the even more obscure specialty of expired photographic film to come up with a similar kind of weird effect. Conveniently, my badly neglected two decade old Nikon FG-20 was already loaded with a roll of film maybe eight or ten years old that I hadn't gotten around to finish.

Here is an example of the kind of image you get when shooting film going back several years and bring it in for development. The helpful staff at the neighborhood drugstore returned my prints with a note giving tips on how to avoid Poor Color Quality, including a warning about old or outdated film. I had to chuckle -- I could not be more delighted with the trippy retro results in fact, and am looking forward to shooting a couple other unexposed rolls of aged film which have just been laying around deteriorating in some unpredictable fashion.

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Gravity is only a suggestion

2009-10-16T14:32:00.003-04:00

Short story title: Experiments in Curved Space

via pbase.com

I think it would make a lovely book cover as well.

Music for Friday: a cover of John Coltrane's Naima

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Green leaves represent

2009-10-16T11:31:00.002-04:00

Domain name: chlorophyllnation.com, vegetationnation.com

I picture a community of users who like to picture what our spaces will look like post-humans as they are returned to a progressively more wild state, focusing on the vegetation more than on the plummeting masonry and rusting automobiles.

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Thinking of next spring

2009-10-15T10:07:00.001-04:00

Musical piece: Sweet Pea Sweet

via flickr.com

I did not do any sweet peas this year, which I think now to have been a mistake, since my soybeans did nothing either. I believe I will plant that whole bed along the driveway in sweet peas next spring for a color shot after the snows melt.

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With this ring I thee hex

2009-10-14T09:56:00.005-04:00

I would take this pincushion ring one step further and make the cushion in the shape of a tiny person, thus making it a Voodoo Ring. I would then market it to ladies unlucky in love and with certain hurt feelings to work out. It would be sized appropriately for the ring finger rather than the thumb. Perhaps if the wearer has a diamond engagement ring, the voodoo ring could be made to fit around it with the stone occupying an anatomical region of some importance, thus making the whole thing that much more pointed.

God-cursed brutes

2009-10-11T11:19:00.003-04:00

Baboon,
originally uploaded by milkfish.

The illustration of the musculature of a snarl is from a book of gross anatomy of primates (baboons, chmpanzees, and humans) and makes me think about the Beowulf story and the first of the monsters in it, Grendel. From Seamus Heaney's translation:

Suddenly then
the God-cursed brute was creating havoc:
greedy and grim, he grabbed thirty men
from their resting places and rushed to his lair,
flushed up and inflamed from the raid,
blundering back with the butchered corpses.
Lines 120---125

Maybe Grendel could have been an enormous baboon larger than a man, his fangs and claws used to grab and carry off his prey, for some reason impervious to edged weapons but susceptible to Beowulf's might in their one and only fight, at the climax of which he has his arm and hand torn off. I could imagine that. Then Grendel's mother would be an even larger sort of baboon wreaking vengeance on the Danes on account of her loss then retreating to her marshy lair, where she too is confronted by the hero:

Quickly the one who haunted those waters,
who had scavenged and gone her gluttonous rounds
for a hundred seasons, sensed a human
observing her outlandish lair from above.
So she lunged and clutched and managed to catch im
in her brutal grip; but his body, for all that,
remained unscathed: the mesh of the chain-mail
save him on the outside. Her savage talons
failed to rip the web of his warshirt
Lines 1497--1505

So perhaps an amphibious, part-human, part-baboon enormous monster race of super-mandrills or the like, able to wield a knife (line 1546) and adapted to live in frigid northern waters. I think that would make a pretty good spectacle, in a graphic novel format or in CGI video.

Curiously om

2009-10-10T07:52:00.001-04:00

Title of the Buddha: The Master of Refreshment

via youtube.com

Add in a small DC motor and this prayer wheel could run continuously until the battery runs down.

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The power behind the drone

2009-10-09T14:59:00.002-04:00

Song name: Aboriginality Is the Art of Concealing Your Power Supply

Music for Friday. The resemblance to the experience of running a drum sander or a router is striking.

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