“There’s an implied obligation of those (myself included) who own these nuggets of history to share them, not squirrel them away in some dusty shoebox only to risk oblivion via flood, fire, or neglect.”- Gary

The Adolph Sutro’s Victorian Cliff House sat upon a cliff in San Fransisco over looking The Sutro Baths for only a 11 years before it tragically caught fire and burnt down in 1907.

However this beautiful Victorian dream home is being preserved by images alone by a man known only to me as “gary“.

His website has done a wonderful job chronicling and preserving the house in all its 19th century glory. From tintypes and post cards to a very cool virtualization of the house using the huge library of photographs, CAD, and the archived blueprints! (which are on the way to my architect as we speak)

It sort of blows my mind frankly. Being able to take a tour through a house that burnt down over over 100 years ago on a coast that is nearly 2,000 miles away. Isn’t the internet great? :D

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This is what happens when cultural icons collide, in many colorful, delightful ways.

Monty Python’s Spanish Inquisition sketch has stood out from their amazingly memorable show (Monty Python’s Flying Circus! Go watch it on Netflix or something), and has blossomed into a lasting cultural reference, at least among the geeks.

Here we see that reference applied in Lego form (which is its own breed of geek culture), and then liberally poured all over stagings of other cultural references, also in Lego form.

References to the (sometimes shockingly influential) Stephen Colbert:

To Star Wars infamous Admiral “It’s a Trap!” Ackbar:

And of course they had to infiltrate the Spartans of meme-tastic 300 fame:

Flickr user </arpy> took these photos at Brickcon 2009, so if you’re into Lego or just really clever sculptural recreations (and new creations too of course), I highly recommend checking out the rest of the set.

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So this year for the first time we lived in an actual neighborhood where trick or treating might actually be possible. (We didn’t really get that many kids though, so now we’ve got WAY too much candy around the house.)

It was decided to get a big ass pumpkin and do something cool with it.

This is the outcome of that decision.

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NARWHAL!

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First up on this WTK is the opposite of wealth. That term is “illth” and was coined by John Ruskin as a way of giving simple voice to the concept of possessing damage, discontent, or general ill health (physically, economically, spiritually, etc). In Ruskin’s case, and in several applications, this is largely applicable to the people (and actions by those people) who are generally considered wealthy.

Wealth, therefore, is ‘The possession of the valuable by the valiant’; and in considering it as a power existing in a nation, the two elements, the value of the thing, and the valour of its possessor, must be estimated together. Whence it appears that many of the persons commonly considered wealthy, are in reality no more wealthy than the locks of their own strong boxes are, they being inherently and eternally incapable of wealth; and operating for the nation, in an economical point of view, either as pools of dead water, and eddies in a stream (which, so long as the stream flows, are useless, or serve only to drown people, but may become of importance in a state of stagnation should the stream dry); or else, as dams in a river, of which the ultimate service depends not on the dam, but the miller; or else, as mere accidental stays and impediments, acting not as wealth, but (for we ought to have a correspondent term) as ‘illth,’ causing various devastation and trouble around them in all directions; or lastly, act not at all, but are merely animated conditions of delay, (no use being possible of anything they have until they are dead,) in which last condition they are nevertheless often useful as delays, and ‘impedimenta,’ (Unto this Last, 1860)

~ emphasis mine, quote boosted directly from the wikipedia article on illth

Here also is a much more concise description of the difference between wealth and illth from the late Robert Anton Wilson:

Wealth is best conceived as all the changes in the “natural” (prehuman) environment that are to the benefit of humanity and/or other life forms. A bridge that gets you across the river without your having to stop and build a raft is wealth in this sense. So is an airport. So is the furniture in your house. Think of ten other examples.

Illth, a term coined by John Ruskin, can be conceived as all the changes in the environment that are detrimental to humanity and/or to life itself. Weaponry, then, should be classed as illth, not wealth. Think of ten other examples.

~ from a very good article featuring several such concepts on nolanchart.com

Here is, for example, Robert Kennedy Jr speaking about the illth generated during the previous President’s tenure in office. (via NewIlluminati)

During the course of of his speech(es), he mentions fairly regularly that the kind of environmental shenanigans that the Bush Administration was getting away with, that the corporate capitalists were/are getting away with, would not fly in a true free market capitalist system, which he seemed to convey with passion was generally self-regulating.

Which brings us to the next WTK term Laissez-faire Capitalism, coming from the the French for “let it be”, pronounced roughly as lah-zeh fair. It in this case referring to the market and its participants. (This was not coined The Beatles, though the general “laissez-faire” attitude appears to have perhaps had some influence on them.)

Generally speaking, the term means “let business run unrestricted by government interference”. While this is nice in theory, it of course produces a surfeit of unique challenges. Most of these challenges, this author would suspect, center around the need for a non-passive consumer base. As with any theory of business, government, and economy, there are a variety of different opinions on what exactly laissez-faire in the context of economic theory really means. The wikipedia article alone points to several branches of thought around the theory in general, and the theory as it relates directly to historical events or other philosophical standpoints.

To provide better context, it also helps to understand the basics of capitalism itself.

Capitalism is an economic system in which wealth, and the means of producing wealth, are privately owned.[1][2] Through capitalism, the land, labor, and capital are owned, operated, and traded, without force or fraud, by private individuals either singly or jointly,[3][4] and investments, distribution, income, production, pricing and supply of goods, commodities and services are determined by voluntary private decision in a market economy.

~ Note: There are no references attached to what appear to be footnote numbers in that definition. Which while irksome does allow me to link to the referring page on nolanchart.com, which has several articles from persons of differing opinion regarding the concept of capitalism in its various forms.

These are complicated ideas, fraught with intellectual and philosophical pitfalls. Perhaps the best phrase to concern yourself with? Laissez les bons temps rouler!

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Skimming through my feeds this morning, I was shocked to see this one from John Brownlee (of Ectomo):

I’ll miss @MacTonnies. Despite being a UFO kook, he was one of the nicest guys ever, and we emailed several times. http://bit.ly/2cjqST

~ twitter.com/drcrypt

UFO Mystic has reported that Mac was found in his apartment, deceased from natural causes.

Who was Mac Tonnies?

Author, blogger, futurologist, skeptic, bibliophile, Fortean, weirdhunter, transhumanist, interplanetary man of mystery.

~ twitter.com/mactonnies

As author of After the Martian Apocalypse (and a book which will be published posthumously, as he’d just turned in a manuscript), several essays and Posthuman Blues, Mac explored a wide variety of topics, and always looked to the future to bring mankind forward in truly remarkable ways, as well as expounding upon theories about intelligence outside our own atmosphere.

A more detailed biography is available by either visiting his personal site: mactonnies.com or simply delving into the backlog of his tweets. So much can be learned about a person through the ephemera they leave behind, and in this case I believe twitter will help serve that purpose well to those who find his work in the future and are curious about what sort of man he was. (Presuming, of course, that his account does not fall into the gaping maw of forward progress or server fuckups.)

I followed Posthuman Blues through a feed I picked up from singlenesia.com called The Cabal. It’s a rich variety of uncommon writers and I highly recommend it. Though I did not read as much of Posthuman Blues as I would have liked, those articles that I did manage to make time for were enjoyable and well written. And those items that he chose to simply repost or share from other areas of the net are fascinating and unique.

Though my acquaintance with his work was rather thin, I feel as though we have lost another excited voice in the push to bring us all to the glorious jet-pack future our forefathers all but promised us. But of course to get there, the future needs all of us to participate. Go read Posthuman Blues!

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A Long while ago, while sitting in my smoking chair blowing contemplatively erotic smoke rings into the air, I thought briefly about what it would be like to publicly gift my fellow gentle breed with my curiously wondrous and humorous tales and musings. The more I pondered about it, the more the thought smoke soaked into the satin night robe of my mind and stained it with a blurry grey smudge of a dream.

That night a fierce ambition was born and from near and far I searched for a proper stand to orate my thoughts into my fellow man. Many found me tiresome, some merely scoffed. Said, they had no time for such a verbose rambler of my sophisticated sort. However, I never weakened in my noble resolve and due to my strict obedience to my pure and admirable principles I was richly rewarded.

I was coaxed by a particularly virile comrade of mine to peer into his Intertronular Computation Mechanism and introduced me to the world wide web of lexicographical luxury known by the lay as the Blogsphere. It was here that I found a suitable home for my intrepid scripting of words.

So I petitioned the owners of several blogs offering my services and at long last I found a place that had use for me and my devilishly constructed sentences of verbose verbal excellence.

This place was named Random Kitty (A name that quite tickled my particular delights). Here I decided I would lay down my singular thoughts and perhaps make a little extra opium money. So with all the grace of a king I greet you all. My name is Klaus, and I will be injecting this blog with my invigorating literary skills. Its surely is a pleasure.

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16-bit Intel 8088 chip

with an Apple Macintosh
you can’t run Radio Shack programs
in its disc drive.
nor can a Commodore 64
drive read a file
you have created on an
IBM Personal Computer.
both Kaypro and Osborne computers use
the CP/M operating system
but can’t read each other’s
handwriting
for they format (write
on) discs in different
ways.
the Tandy 2000 runs MS-DOS but
can’t use most programs produced for
the IBM Personal Computer
unless certain
bits and bytes are
altered
but the wind still blows over
Savannah
and in the Spring
the turkey buzzard struts and
flounces before his
hens.

– Charles Bukowski

That is featured at the opening of a fantastic article which covers and ruminates on writers Charles Bukowski and William S. Burroughs, their flirtations with the dawning “Digital Age” (as I’ve heard it called). Bukowski took to it like a duck to water, by all accounts. He recognized the immediacy of computer-based writing, leveraging the speed of typing with the ability to edit freely.

Burroughs, for all his talk of the future, appears to have worked exclusively in handwriting and typewriters.

Originally found via GeekForceFive.

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naaaaaaaaaaarf

I confess to deleting a couple of new spam comments to catch this moment. :]

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As a retrospective I’ve decided to dump (nearly) every picture I took. There’s a mix of travel photos, some repeat photos from previous posts, and photos of Portland. Click on the thumbnails below for the big version. And the photo on the detail page for the extra big version.

Also I just remembered that the first photo was an attempt to capture the following: The bus was Paul Revere, the sign overhead was for British Airway. I was punchy and found that highly amusing. Photo didn’t turn out so well though.

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