iSuck

The Future of the Newspaper, the Newspaper of the Future

2007-12-07T20:11:00.000Z

Of all the old media formats that lay dying in the shadow of the internet, the daily newspaper is the greatest and most unfortunate of losses. The newspaper was an indispensable tool in the rise of post-Enlightenment democracy, publicizing the ideas behind the American and French revolutions.

Since that time, the newspaper has played a central role in every war, election and public event in the industrialized world. For the latest in-depth news and rough summary of public consensus, the newspaper was the well-informed person's key source. Even in the age of television, nothing beat a newspaper for its scope and detail.

Obviously, those times have come to an end. The internet is where news is distributed now. The newspaper, as it exists today is a relic, printed only for the sake of tradition, and the pleasure of those diehards who cannot break the habit of yesterday's technology.

But as the newspaper fades away, we lose its single-most important benefit. The unique advantage of a newspaper is its portability. The Kindle and the iPod represent breakthroughs in the portability of electronic media, but they are far from acheiving the portability of the printed page. No device can ever be as lightweight, disposable and as easily manipulable as paper. It seems hard to argue that any electronic device will ever fully overlap the ease and convenience of the book or printed sheet.

Meanwhile, "Short Run Digital Printing" is a technology that has been in development for several years now, and it promises to bridge the gap between the rapid-distribution capabilities of electronic media and the unique conveniences of printed media.

There is an unexploited opportunity here. With some clever software design and marketing it is conceivable that someone out there could make a lot of money devising a system for delivering a highly-personalized news product that could be printed from street kiosks or even in the home.

Whether they prefer comic strips, sports scores, financial information, obituaries, grocery advertisements, local crime news, election information, or any of the other hundreds of things that the daily paper used to deliver, the common news consumer loves to have a real crinkling piece of paper to hold and read on the bus to work, over the morning coffee or with the evening cocktail. The internet has revolutionized the flow of information, but humans will always have a place in their hearts for news that they can fold. Hopefully, those with the resources will soon realize the basic truth of this fact and make a reality out of something that has long been needed and is entirely possible at this very moment.

-z

R.I.P. Evel Knievel

2007-11-30T22:15:00.000Z

Alas, he was a childhood hero.

AOL News.
Yahoo News

Legendary Daredevil Evel Knievel Dies

Al Qaeda's Holiday Marketing Strategy Creates Consternation

2007-11-22T08:40:00.000Z

International News Syndicate, Nov. 22, 2007

Washington D.C.- We know it as al Qaeda. But to the people at the Department of Homeland Security, it is a global corporation built to market nothing more than wanton violence. A desperate hatred drives this terrorism machine, and strips it of any inhibition in its quest for total control.

Only recently has a new plot come to light, allowing a glimpse into the plans of the fanatical menace. Al Qaeda Inc. are planning a major marketing campaign for the Holiday season, including the release of a new suicide-bombing kit designed specially for children, according to Department of Homeland Security officials.

“I had a gut feeling about this, but this time I've also got internet chatter to back it up,” said Michael Chertoff, DHS chief at a completely genuine press conference today.

Chertoff said that the RSS feed from al-qaeda.com has revealed the release of new terrorism equipment under the Al Qaeda brand name, and calls for attacks on shopping malls at the height of the Christmas season. The flagship product in this marketing campaign is a suicide-bombing kit, called Watch Me Martyr, that includes a bicycle and an child-sized explosive vest, he said. In addition to details about the kit, the RSS feed also delivered a call for bombings at the Mall of America on the day after Thanksgiving, the traditional beginning of the US Christmas shopping season.

“This year the Terror Alert level isn't red, it's red and green,” he said.

In spite of these warnings, ordinary Americans do not seem to be alarmed.

“I do all my Christmas shopping online, anyway, ” said Stanley Erdnase, a Boston, Massachusetts cellist, in a telephone interview Saturday.

“The Mall of America? They still have that?” said Kim Dereksen, a Fargo, North Dakota school teacher, also in a telephone interview.

The Mall of America was built in the early 1990s by the Triple Five Group, a property development company owned and operated by four brothers. Nader Ghermezian, one of the Triple Five Group owners, said by email that he is aware of the al Qaeda marketing campaign, and that he has instructed Mall of America merchants against offering any al Qaeda product for sale, including the Watch Me Martyr suicide bombing kit.

“Those Keystone Cops over at DHS can save themselves the trouble. The FBI too. Bin Laden has [expletive] with the wrong guy,” said Ghermezian on his blog this weekend. None of the other Ghermezian brothers or their spokespeople returned messages left throughout the week.

Nationwide, several independent retailers have made orders for the Watch Me Martyr kits, which ships in late November. However, both Wal-Mart and Target have released statements reminding shoppers that they have never carried al Qaeda products.

“Al Qaeda is the enemy of freedom. We do not, nor have we ever, believed al Qaeda products to be worthy of the American consumer,” said Wal-Mart in a press release issued this morning.

-Khaleda Shirazi contributed to this report.

Happy 11/11

2007-11-11T06:49:00.001Z

The staff at Hollow Tree Experimental Design Studios and the iSuck blog would like to wish you and yours a warm, safe and happy 11/11 holiday.

Diary of a slow suicide

2007-10-30T21:13:00.000Z

Among the very deadliest things around is cancer. It's the second leading cause of death in the United States, right after heart disease. If you're an American, or a citizen of one of the so-called industrialized nations, you probably know someone who has it, will know such a person in the future, will suffer cancer yourself, or--heaven forbid--it could likely be the cause of your own unfortunate passing.

Cancer is real. It's something we'll all have to think about at some point in our life.

And famously, there is no cure for the dread disease. However, medical science is getting closer and closer to sure-fire treatments. Among the most promising is the genetic re-engineering of viruses to attack cancerous cells in our bodies. This treatment is still in its earliest stages of experimentation, but perhaps one day it will be the thing that saves us all from the "big C."

Meanwhile, the standard treatment for cancer is to have the tumor removed surgically, if possible, and then to have either chemotherapy, radiation therapy or a combination of the two. The exact details of an individual's cancer treatment are best determined by a good doctor. The most fortunate among us will have a team of crack oncologists at our disposal.

Possibly the worst thing anyone can do once diagnosed with cancer is to leave the tumor intact and to try to treat the disease with “alternative therapies.” Yet, quite a lot of people make this choice. Among this population is one Susan Insole, a former British nurse and the mind behind the Natural Health Benefits website.

It's always encouraging to see those with strong ideas put their own physical well being on the line in support of their opinions. Aside from that, though, a bad idea is still a bad idea. Insole is not only forgoing a tumorectomy and subsequent treatment for her breast cancer, but she is also taking on a self-proscribed dietary regimen and chronicling the progress of her disease on the anti-medical website What Doctors Don't Tell You.

It is not an unusual thing at all to choose an alternative treatment over an actual one, but to make the additional decision to write about the process on the internet is something else entirely. Insole's story raises more issues than can be counted, among them the role that the internet plays in helping misguided people support one another in maintaining their delusions.

The best thing that can happen for Insole is for her cancer to go into spontaneous remission, despite her decision to avoid proper treatment. This is not likely, but all the same, we hope that it happens, despite any damage that such a turn of events will do to the public's opinion of science-based medicine.

Dennis Prager, one more moron on the internet

2007-10-30T16:05:00.000Z

No one truly knows the limits of human stupidity. But, through the man-made miracle of the internet, we have a better measure of our collective foolishness than ever before.

The amount of free-ranging idiocy on the nets is known by all and lamented by many. And often it is the very lamentation of stupidity which brings the stupidity to greater heights.

A fine example of this is Dennis Prager's recent column “How to Get Moron's Off the Internet.” Prager seems to believe that he has a clever solution to the problem of bile and ignorance on the internet. Simply ban anonymous posting, he says. If the operators of websites would require all commentors to state their real names and locations, discourse on the internet would magically elevate itself.

This kind of simplistic reasoning is standard for Prager, whose career as a social pundit centers around an ongoing attack against a homogeneous “liberal” strawman that exists only in the minds of himself and his talk-radio colleagues. Among Prager's more ridiculous positions are that politicians who stand opposed to gay rights, though they may be secretly gay themselves, ought not to be exposed as closeted homosexuals; that Judaism and Christianity, taken together, are “the finest system of values ever devised”; and that public swearing somehow causes injury to our general culture. Dennis Prager is essentially a mouthpiece for the “traditional American values” crowd. If social conservatives as a group have any position on any given issue then, right or wrong, Prager is there right along with them.

Not satisfied with mere redundancy, Prager does go off the talking points with some regularity. Most recently, Mr. Prager has made an expedition into the chaotic subject of internet culture. He is absolutely correct in saying that the internet is overrun with hateful jackasses, but he loses all credibility when he proposes eliminating anonymity as a solution.

The problem with eliminating anonymity on the internet has nothing to do with issues of free expression. The problem, which defies any workaround, is nothing more than simple practicality. It can't be done. Anonymity is as much an ineluctable part of the internet as wetness is of rain. Which is to say that anonymity is built into the medium.

As anyone who knows a little history may remember, the internet grew out a United States military project to develop a communication system that could withstand a nuclear assault. Much has changed since the original AARPA days, but the decentralized quality of the internet persists. Along with this quality, the internet is also open to including any machine from any location. It is possible to link an iPod to the internet, as well as an Xbox or any other electronic device that can run software. If it can be programmed, it can be connected. More than that, any machine that can be connected can be rendered anonymous using any of a wide array of software applications.

This means that it is not possible to completely exclude anonymous users from the internet. Of course, the owners of specific websites could easily require that visitors identify themselves in order to leave comments. This already happens quite a lot to discourage spam artists who try to use comment services for advertising purposes. It isn't unusual for websites to ask users to register in order to use their sites, but many of these internet services find that requiring registration actually decreases their traffic, as users are reluctant to have to remember one more password, or to give their email address to one more organization who may send them unwanted messages.

As Prager himself says, there is a financial price for a website that might want to eliminate anonymity. That price is irrelevance. There will always be websites willing to allow anonymous posting, which would create a total competitive disadvantage for websites that do not. Because of this, anonymity will always exist on the internet, and to expect anything else is naïve.

It may well be that Prager proposed this “banning” of anonymity from the net as a way to vent his frustration against the hordes of trolls who have been leaving rude comments to his grandmotherly internet columns. Still, the idea is so outrageously dimwitted that it begs for a response. Prager shows a hopeless misunderstanding of the world that he lives in, not realizing that vitriol on the internet is something that he is just going to have to learn to accept. Anonymous comments may not be pleasant, and they may not be “good” for society, but in the long run they are essentially harmless. Rather than trying to design a hare-brained solution to a non-problem, Prager would do better to spend his time reconsidering his own misguided view of the world, and getting comfortable with the unalterability of reality. Once he has done this and begins writing columns that make practical sense, he may find that the rude comments do not come with such regularity.

###

iSuck Programming Notes

2007-10-28T22:54:00.000Z

The light of another Sunday is fading quickly. I want to toss in a couple of hastily written self-referential comments during these non-peak hours...

The seven-posts in seven-days thing didn't work out exactly as I had announced it would. But still, I got seven posts in, more or less. Problem is they were longer than is really appropriate for a blog. That's fine. I've still got a couple more of these overweight essays ready to drop in the coming days. But amidst those I hope to get a few 250-word posts in. Hopefully they'll be worth your time.

I know that there are at least a couple of people who are seeing this blog, if not necessarily reading it. Please feel free to let me know if you want more or less of anything I'm providing here. The iSuck blog is mostly for my own amusement, but at the same time it's all the more amusing to me if I've got any sort of audience. So, tell me how to pander to you. I'll probably comply. Use the comments section, or email me directly. However you like.

And no doubt you've seen the delightful redesign. Most significant is the right-hand column. The hand-filtered newsfeed is now supplying the full content of the items, rather than just the headlines. Unfortunately, the del.icio.us links are popping up far too often for my taste. Tweaking will continue.

That's all for now. Thanks for your time.

-Zeno Izen

A Solution to the Steroid Problem

2007-10-26T07:02:00.000+01:00

Steroids have been a part of sports for years now, and they are here to stay. Not only that, but steroids are just the beginning. Soon enough we will see robotic and genetic enhancements to the human body that will let athletes perform at many times their natural capabilities. As science marches on, records will be smashed over and over again. Are you ready for the 200-mph fastball? How about the 1500-home-run career, or the two-minute mile? Not even science fiction is the limit in the world of athletic competition, because whatever can be engineered will be put to quick use on the playing field.

The only uncertainty is how the rulemakers of the various sports leagues will treat these advancements. The current trend is to prohibit technological ability-boosters, to banish them into a hidden sphere. With steroids prohibited, honest players must compete against cheaters, standards of achievement become skewed and sports fans can no longer be sure who is a true winner and who is a juiced-up manbeast taking advantage of an unbalanced situation.

It's as true in sports as anywhere else, prohibition is terrible mistake. The difference is that, in sports, to ban enhancements is twice the error. Drug users tend to fail real world, but the opposite is true in sports--at least over the short term. Steroid users will always win against their more honest opponents, and those who follow the rules will never break the records set by more-than-human competitors.

But while prohibition is a foolish policy, it is clearly necessary to exert some sort of control over these substances--not to mention whatever else might be on its way down the research pipeline. Whatever is allowed will become an immediate standard. If one man quadruples the size of his pitching arm with stem cells, then everyone else will have to do it just to keep up. In competitive situations, what is not prohibited becomes obligatory. It would be terribly unwise to ask our up and coming athletes to destroy their bodies just so that they can play a game.

The best solution then is to partition our sports. There is no reason we can't have separate leagues in each sport, one that allows any possible enhancement, and one that allows no enhancements at all.

The benefits of a system that separates sports into enhanced and non-enhanced leagues are plain.

A main improvement under this system will be that performance enhancement will come out of the closet. No parent will have to lecture their children on the dangers of steroid or amphetamine use because these risks will be openly illustrated by the scores of sports heroes who will suffer from brain cancer, abnormal hair and sudden coronary explosions.

As cyborgenics become available, we will also see athletes with robotic limbs and bits of facial circuitry. Admittedly, the fact that these physical upgrades will be introduced to us by famous sports figures may actually add an element of romance to the technology. However it's also an undeniable fact that when once these things are invented, there will be no way to stop their infiltration into our culture. It is better to have the gear tested in full public view under high-performance conditions than to have them sold to us "as is" by less-than-honest marketing hacks.

Wearable computing and cyborgenics are things of the near future. As a species, we have lived through the introduction of many new technologies, and it's about time we began to get this process right. Consider the automobile. How many years, and how many lives, passed us by before we saw the invention of seat belts and air bags? Or take an additional example--genetic engineering. The citizenry tend to fear this technology and clamor for regulation that is much more dramatic than necessary. In either case, the legislation on these innovations has been either too late or too quick.

But in the case of re-engineering the human body, we have the luxury of a class of people who will willingly test these things and do it at their own expense. Considering the entertainment value that comes as a bonus, why not let them?

There are many more possible benefits of this idea, but I will add just one more. When performance enhancement is brought out in the open through league partitioning, we will no longer have to suffer the heartbreak, or witness the disgrace, as our beloved athletes are inevitably caught cheating at their games. Episodes such as our ongoing suspicion of Barry Bonds, and our shock at the downfall of Marion Jones will no longer haunt us, and we will be free to enjoy the diversions of sport once again.

Teach the Controversy: Pot Cures Gayness

2007-10-20T19:25:00.000+01:00

International News Syndicate, Oct. 19, 2007

BOSTON, Ma. - Charles Trimbach a 62-year-old engineer from St. Louis had never used marijuana in his life, but one morning after a three day gay-sex binge, he decided to give it a try.

Once the drug kicked in, Trimbach said, his homosexual desires seemed to just melt away.

"VH-1 was on the television, and I saw that woman Shania Twain. It was like, suddenly I understood what all the fuss was about," he said.

Trimbach is not alone. A study done at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has found that as many as one in three recovered homosexuals attribute marijuana to helping them overcome their same-sex desires.

"Marijuana has a longstanding tradition among folk herbalists, but only now is academic science beginning to understand how powerful a remedy this can be," said Kim Dereksen, co-chair of the Centers for Research in Disturbed Sexualities at MIT. Dereksen and her colleagues have recently begun a five year study into the effects of marijuana on sexual health, subsidized by grants from the National Institutes of Health.

While the study has begun only recently, Dereksen said that early results have been promising.

"We are seeing a marked reduction in disturbed sexual impulses among many of the test subjects. In at least one case we seem to be on the way to a complete turnaround," she said.

The benefits of marijuana therapy may extend well beyond sexual health for many sufferers of sexual disabilities. Trimbach said that his life improved in several ways once his homosexuality was in remission.

"Now that I'm not gay anymore, I feel worthy to show up at church again," Trimbach said. Approximately one half of a marijuana cigarette in the parking lot before services is all it takes to prepare for worship, he said.

As successful as some claim it to be, this cure for homosexuality still has many opponents. Among them is Amid al-Ziwiharjimad, a researcher for the Royal Interfaith Ethical Assembly in Yorkshire, England. Al-Ziwiharjimad said that the trend to medicalize marijuana is not only scientifically unsound, but also dangerous.

"Marijuana is not medicine. It is an extremely addictive drug that destroys lives," he said.

The interfaith assembly, for which al-Ziwiharjimad works, has developed a program to teach younger school students about the perceived dishonesties in the medical marijuana movement. By informing younger children about the dangers of marijuana, and its ineffectiveness as a medicine, al-Ziwiharjimad said that a more realistic understanding of the substance can once again take social prominence.

"We need to remember that you don't smoke medicine. Is tobacco a medicine? No, it's a poison," he said.

However, efforts at informing students about the harmful effects of marijuana are seen by some as one sided.

"Instead of teaching children that something is good or bad, we need to tell them that science is still trying to understand it. We need to show them both sides of the issue. We need to teach the controversy," Dereksen said.

###

Day 4: The Turkey Jive

2007-10-15T19:36:00.000+01:00

"Democracies can't fight wars very well."

I heard someone on the television say that. Don't ask me who it was, because I can't remember and it's really not that important. The important thing is that it's a strange thing to say when Athens did so well, not to mention our own blessed United States.

The honest truth is that democracies fight wars just fine when the war is not controversial. However, when confronted with something somewhat less certain, as in the example of the current Stupid War, victory is not as easy. War is by nature and tradition a dictatorial undertaking. There is no time on the battlefield to take a vote. This notion might lead some to think that there is no hope for the rights of man, that the democractic trend in human history will be invevitably swamped by the martial efficiency of top-down power.

But we needn't give up hope. Democracies can indeed fight wars, and succeed in doing so. Even controversial wars can be fought by democratic nations. However, if such a war is to be fought by such a nation, it is absolutely mandatory that the leadership of the democratic nation take the time to eliminate the controversy.

Take for example, the war in Iraq, which is quickly becoming not so controversial and more or less hated by the population of the United States. There is a lot of agreement that Saddam Hussein was a bad person. Even the idea that he was an enemy of America is not much of a cause for disagreement. The only real controversy in the Iraq war is that Hussein was the wrong target at the wrong time. I don't think it's far fetched at all to say that the voting public might have supported a war against Iraq if only it had been initiated after the perpetrators of the September 11 attacks had been killed or arrested.

It is a crisply inarguable fact that the American craving for revenge was essentially unanimous on September 12, 2001 and that the population of the earth was in full support of that American craving. There was a rare momentum in global politics at that moment. Anyone of even mediocre statesmanship could have exploited this momentum and become history's immortal saviour. What are the odds that the perfect fool would be in position to squander the good will of an entire planet? Those odds are so slim that I sometimes wonder if the United States is not in fact what many mystical patriots believe it to be, the primary implement in the plans of a mysterious god.

Let's not succumb to mysticism. Let us assume what is most likely, that there is no god in heaven and that tomorrow's history is yet to be made. A more sophisticated man would have taken the wheels of state after the World Trade Center tradgedy for the single purpose of keeping the machine on its downhill path. How could the United States, with the finest military and forensic ability in all the world, fail in finding one single man, even if he were to hide in mountains of Pakistan? The only way that would be possible is if our leadership lacked the will.

That's exactly what happened. For whatever reasons, be they dark or simply idiotic, the Bush administration pulled the only punch it was ever sure to land.

And the rest is history. Now we are up to the knees in what Donny Rumsfeld himself famously called a "long hard slog," which sounds too much like "quagmire" for my tastes. But we're in it. It's an ugly mess and no one with any sense is happy about it, but still we're in it and the only way out of it is for us all to use our heads and makes the right decisions.

Of course, I've got my own ideas about what those decisions ought to be. I'll keep those ideas to myself. There are enough pennies in the fountain right now. We have come to the end of the brainstorming session. Now is the time for paring back the foolishness, and for becoming extremely clear on the proper course of action.

One bit of foolishness that ought to be eliminated straight away is the obstinate streak that seems to have taken control of certain minds in our Loyal Oppostion. What is this nonsense about criticising Turkey for the Armenian Holocaust? Have the Democrats in Congress gone feeble? Not only is Turkey a critical staging ground for our operations in the Middle East, but that country is also on the verge of invading Northern Iraq to hunt down our good Kurdish friends in that area. This is not the time to piss off the government of Turkey.

But yet, here we go. A man has your wallet and he is about to shoot your friend in the face. What do you do? Do you say "Hey, buddy, let's cool it and talk about things for a minute"? Or do you tell him what you really think?

Maybe we're all crisis addicts in this society, raised on adrenaline and cliff-hangers. Maybe we can't focus unless the the pressure is on. Sometimes that's the only explanation that makes any sense. If it's true, though, we're in for it. You can't roll the dice over and over again without eventually getting snake eyes. And now the stakes are higher than even during the Cold War. Back then we had mutually assured destruction, which meant that our opponent had as much to lose as we did ourselves. Today the destruction is only assured on our side. The enemy has nothing to lose, because the enemy is ourselves.

Meanwhile, life goes on. There's an election about to take place. Hopefully, there will be no sudden moves made before Happy the Clown is replaced. If the human propensety for sheer idiocy does not win the day, we may all survive to keep democracy alive for another few years.

Day 3ish: Panhandling for Reparations

2007-10-12T20:42:00.000+01:00

On October 10, Damali Ayo and scores of others went out on the streets of America to panhandle for reparations.

Have your buttons been pushed?

Though the ostensible purpose of this action was to bring the issue of reparations into the sphere of public discussion, the National Day of Panhandling was clearly designed to stoke liberal guilt and conservative irritability.

After all, reparations for slavery and the rest of institutionalized racism in the United States will never ever happen. It's just too much money. It's possible that a portion of these reparations could have been paid if George Bush hadn't run up the federal credit card so badly these past years. But even if the funds were available, deciding how much money should be paid out and to whom would be an unsolvable puzzle. The question would end up in congressional committees for the next hundred years.

But the underlying point of the reparations discussion is that black people in the United States are still on an unequal footing as a result of slavery, segregation, and simple racism. If this is the problem, then there are many solutions to choose from. Education and business subsidies for minorities are not unaffordable, in the balance of things. Incentives for businesses to help with economic inequities are also possible. These are just ideas. With a little creativity and a lot of good faith, solutions can be found. Reparations, however, are not the least bit practical.

A basic truth of negotiating theory is that you begin by asking for more than you want. We are in a pregnant phase of our political cycle. Electoral candidates and the media all have an unquenchable need for issues to talk about. It's clever of Ayo to throw the reparations issue into the mix at this time and in this fashion. No doubt she will receive an abundance of sharp criticism for it, but that is completely beside the point.

If we can wind the Stupid War down in a way that makes America stronger, not weaker, and also see fit to elect a president who is interested in managing the economy in a responsible way, we may find ourselves with enough slack for everyone.

Reparations will never solve anything. What we need instead is general prosperity. Still, a little discussion doesn't hurt, even if it includes poking at sore spots.

Day 2: Panhandling for Reparations

2007-10-10T04:33:00.000+01:00

If you're reading this on Oct. 10, 2007 then let me wish you a happy National Panhandling for Reparations Day.

The event, invented by performance artist damali ayo (she spells it lower case), involves at least 65 people around the United States and in the UK and New Zealand collecting money on the streets and paying it back out to passing black people. Donors and recipients will get receipts.

Ayo says on her website that the purpose for the event is to open a dialog about reparations for slavery in the United States. I will have some comments on this subject tomorrow, but until then, here are some links:

the official page for the First Annual National Day of Panhandling for Reparations
damali ayo's website
a discussion of the event at the Skeptic's Guide to the Universe forum

If you have any other links related to this event that you think should be included here, please send them to hollowtreesubmit@gmail.com I'll post them up right away.

10/9/2007 23:32:41

Day 1: On competition

2007-10-09T03:03:00.000+01:00

Okay, first day of seven, and the entry is loooong. It's just a few thoughts about competition, and my own relationship with it. It's not a great piece of writing, but it's also not nearly as bad as I was expecting it to be. I think if I rewrite it one day, and cut approximately 400 words, I may have something.

Anyway, read what you can. I'll try to post something much shorter tomorrow. -z

--

My youth was thick was leftist ideology. I listened to a lot of political punk rock, read a lot of anarchocommunist books and magazines, and heard endless hours of left-wing commentary on Pacifica radio. I took it all to heart and it has had an immeasurable effect on how I've perceived the world.

I credit my leftist upbringing for helping me avoid the traps of racism, sexism and classism that affect so many Americans. But at the same time, the effects have not all been benign. One particular side effect of leftist thinking that has not served me very well is a disdain of competition. Leftism teaches us that competition is a thing to avoid, in favor of the--hypothetically--more desirable mode of cooperation. Cooperation, say the left-wing analysts, is the key to building a utopian society. If only we would all develop cooperative ethics to replace our competetive instincts, we could all live in harmonious prosperity, freeing ourselves once and for all of war, famine, pestilence and possibly even death.

The problem with this is that cooperation is an ethic, and competition is an instinct. It is exactly true that we would all, each and every one of us, have to adopt this ethic for utopia to emerge. To succeed, cooperative ethics require the ongoing participation of all, while competition needs only the short-term dedication of an individual. Furthermore, societies based on cooperative ethics are very easily usurped by ruthless and manipulative individuals. And such individuals are far from rare.

Despite the fact that we are all born competetive, and only become cooperative through social processes, there is still a firm minority that believes in this ethic, and practices it. In the United States, there is a lively subculture that applies cooperative principles to all of its projects. The somewhat recent development of the co-op style grocery store is an artifact of this subculture. I myself have participated in microwatt radio stations that strove to abide by cooperative principles, as well as independent periodicals, music groups and venues.

Through these endeavors, I have met a number of people who have claimed cooperative principles as the highest good. Consistently, I have been disappointed with the level of these people's dedication. Many of them have reminded me of priests unable to keep their vows, saying one thing from the pulpit, but doing the entire opposite in the rectory. Many of the most active anarchists, marxists and other left wingers that I have met have been at least as competetive as any of the Republicans or middle-of-the-road American consumerists that I have known. If anything, it seems to me that the cooperative ethic has had no better effect on leftists than to make their competetive behavior a little bit more weasly, a little bit more underhanded, a little bit less noble in its tone.

I was naive. I never accounted for the possibility of hypocrisy. Now, though it's too late, I know that hypocrisy is the rule not the exception. But worse, as I attempted to move through this leftist world, I sublimated my own competetive instincts into striving to be more committed to cooperative ethics. I perceived every double-cross against myself as a victory, proof that I was more of an anarchist because I did not stoop to take advantage of my leftist acquaintances.

But of course, competitiveness is everywhere. Outside of the leftist subculture competetiveness is more open. In the real world, everyone is competetive, and no one is ashamed of it. The competetiveness can be veiled for other reasons, though. After all, if you can play to win without anyone knowing about it, your chances of success automatically increas.

One of the most common forms of competetive behavior that we encounter in ordinary life is the time-honored practice of one-upmanship, which is currently defined by Wikipedia as "the systematic and conscious practice of making one's associates feel inferior and thereby gaining the status of being 'one-up' on them." The term was coined by British author Stephen Potter in his series of humorous books on the subject. I've read most of the books, by the way, and they are excellent.

If the concept of one-upmanship is not clear to you, let me give you a simple example from Potter's books. In one passage, Potter offers the advice that if someone should have a larger than average house, or even a mansion, it is good one-upmanship to refer to this house as a cottage. In the United States, maybe 'bungalow' or 'cabin' would work better. Continuously calling someone's oversized house a 'cabin' could, if done with the correct amount of subtlety, drive the homeowner just a little crazy.

If this example seems benign, remember that Potter wrote his books in the 1930s, for a British audience. Our modern America has no room for anything subtle at all. One-upmanship, I think, has advanced to the level that what we would consider a light needling, Potter might think of as an outrageous assault.

Direct insults, taunting, threats of violence, and so on are more common replacements for the one-upmanship of historic times. But the game are still played much the same way, make your associates feel inferior, and do it quick before they do it to you.

Up until this point in my life, I've reacted to most of the one-upmanship I've encountered with bitterness. I've never learned to return fire, only to become disgruntled that someone would take it upon themselves to make an invasion into my psychological territory. Of course, a reaction like that is completely ineffectual. To become upset at an act of one-upmanship is equivalent to surrender. The entire purpose of one-upmansip is to interrupt flow, to disrupt composure or to cause some other sort of turbulence in the atmosphere of a fellow's psyche.

To get upset is to lose the game. That's the whole point, and I've only recently realized this. What a fool I've been.

Fortunately, it's obvious to me now that one-upmanship is a challenge and that the correct response is a counter attack. It is necessary to hit back and to hit back hard. Even if the retaliation is not perfectly effective, the least effect is that it will let the opponent know that there is no such thing as a free lunch.

Now, I haven't had a lot of practice at this game, so I'm not exactly good at it. I overcompensate for my weakness by hitting back not once or twice but as many times as possible. To keep the war metaphors going, a single distance crack of rifle fire will attract a five-hour shelling from my side of the trench.

I usually feel a little guilty about this, but then I think that I'm not the type of person to initiate such confrontations. If I had been left alone, there would have been peace. The recipient of my wrath has only himself to blame. My only intent in my viscious responses to one-upmanship is to prevent any future attacks. Your choices are: be nice, keep your distance or take cover.

Most often, the results of my asymetrical counterstrikes are little better than simple surrender. I fire back and sometimes it's just embarrassing. All the same, I'm learning, and I'm trying, and honestly I really am slowly getting better at this competitivity business.

I think a breakthrough came the day I learned to not take failure as a cue to become despondent. Truly, no failure is ever final. Failure is only real when you lose heart. For the victory-oriented soul, failure is no worse than a warning signal. The best among us take failure as an opportunity to reassess their situation--as quickly as possible. The habitual winner, in the grip a failure situation, knows that he must focus more keenly than ever before upon the situation that confronts him. He must sift, rapidly, through the details of his conflict and find that can afford him leverage.

There are many techniques for turning our failures into the beginnings of greater success. I don't know all of them, but I have learned a few. One of them is reframing. If a person can see a situation from a new perspective, it's possible to find an innovative way to prevail. Another means to overcoming failure is to understand the opponent. Any human being is well supplied with doubts and insecurities, not to mention weaknessess and areas of true incompetence. As Napoleon Bonaparte showed us many times over, apply your greatest strength to your enemies greatest weakness and you'll likely get the best of him.

Competition is a complicated subject, and I'm getting a late start. On the other hand, competition is also as old as humanity itself and much has been written about it. I think if I read the right materials, and think deeply about the actual ins and outs of human competition, I may soon overcome the handicap that I have inherited from the well-meaning, but off-center cooperative ethicists that I looked up to in my youth.
###
10/8/2007 22:02:34

A shot across the bow

2007-10-07T21:16:00.000+01:00

I don't know if I feel more like Howard Carter seeing "wonderful things" for the first time in the tomb of Tutankhamen, or Casanova breaking loose of Doge's palace. Maybe either metaphor works, or neither. Whatever the case, I've broken through something, and it's a great feeling.

After several months of grappling for any kind of meaning in this godless life, I finally decided that thinking is only good for so much. Thinking is great, and more people should do it, but in the final analysis it's only doing that ever really makes a difference. For example, the somehwat famous Dr. John Lilly used to eat LSD and other psychoactive chemicals and get into a sensory deprivation tank. He spent hours in that tank, traveling further out toward the edges of the world of hallucinations than much of anyone has gone before or since. He met imaginary people, and saw imaginary things that would not have otherwise been conceived. John Lilly took the Big Trip, and then journeyed back with his mind intact.

This, though, was not enough. Anyone can hallucinate, just the same as anyone can think. Lilly's triumph was never that he had magnificent hallucinations, but that he set these hallucinations down in writing for all to share in the fullness of time. Had he not taken the additional step of recording his dreams, Lilly's dreams would never have amounted to more than idle self-inflicted psychosis.

All of this is plain enough to anyone, but for some reason it took me all of these past months to arrive at a really visceral understanding of it. And, unfortunately, in the time it took me to realize what should have been obvious, I neglected to keep my writing skills sharp.

That's right. I pretty much quit writing this summer. Not only did I quit writing in actuality, but I also quit writing in my head, which is just as important. The result was that my ability to write was gone, completely.

In the meantime, I had been teaching myself some sleight of hand. I learned a couple of coin vanishes, some card tricks and so on. Maybe it was dumb luck, or maybe I know what I'm doing in a less than conscious way, but learning these magic tricks helped me understand something that applied directly to the writing process: practice is fundamental.

For sleight of hand to work, you have to practice the moves over and over again. Most sleight of hand moves are not natural, but with repetetive practice anyone can develop the specific muscles in their hand that make the move possible. I believe Penn Jillette pointed this out at some time. Most people just can't believe that someone would spend endless hours teaching themselves to hide a card in the palm of their hand, and it's this disbelief that makes the illusion work.

My ultimate goal with sleight of hand is to develop a spoon-bending routine that will make Uri Geller look like a chump. I'm halfway to that goal. All I need do is steal a hundred spoons or two so that I can practice.

Sleight of hand is beside the point, though. What I want to tell you about is my thousand-word-a-day-for-seven-days challenge. Knowing that I needed to get back on the writing horse, and also knowing that I'd fallen way behind in maintaining my writing skills, I decided to create a regimen for myself.

I kept it simple. I decided to commit myself to a seven day plan, and for each of those seven days to write at least one thousand words. I began the project on October first. Today is October seventh and I am proud to tell you that I have accomplished my goal.

The seven thousand words that came about as a result of my self-challenge are hardly worth reading. I may go over them for ideas, but it's most probable that the file will have to go in the recycle bin.

More important is the fact that I have to move my plan forward. From here I have to start writing things that I'm comfortable putting before an audience. There are issues involved in this that are a little too complex to go over at this moment, and I don't guess, either, that the issues are really all that interesting to anyone.

The upshot is that I am engaging in a new challenge as of this moment. Beginning tonight at midnight, I have committed to posting something to the iSuck blog every day for seven days. These posts may not always be that good. That isn't really the point. The point is to prime the pump so that I can start chugging out copy.

Let this be a warning to you, then. As of this moment, iSuck is live. It's going to be a rough takeoff, you can count on that. But once we've reached cruising altitude, I'm sure we're going to be on our way to a magical land.
10/7/2007 16:14:14

More internet blather. Don't thank me.

2007-09-20T23:30:00.000+01:00

I haven't posted to either of my two blogs in quite a while. The reasons are a little bit complicated, but allow me to try to simplify them.

Writing isn't easy. I probably make it a lot harder on myself than it needs to be. We're our own worst critic, as the wise saying goes. In my own case, my self criticism has gotten to the point that it's a miracle if I can write an entire sentence without feeling that it needs to be deleted immediately.

So you can see that I've got enough against me to begin with. But then, as I'm struggling to squeeze out even the shortest little thing that I can put up on the internet for all to see, yet one more voice echoes through my consciousness, mocking me for believing that anyone will even read the words that I have labored to produce.

The internet is a roaring din of voices. Considering that it takes so much effort to put the words together in the first place, to want to add my own voice to the internet's edifice of gibber gabber is completely stupid.

This problem is compounded by the fact that no one reads either of my blogs to begin with. Oh, sure you read. For that I thank you. But the thing is, there are only two of you and as much as I appreciate your faith and time, two readers (on average) isn't enough of an audience to justify the mental contortions I seem to need to put myself through in order to properly express a thought.

This has been the problem, more or less, for twenty months or so. At the beginning of this summer, my distress over these matters reached a critical point. I stopped blogging altogether so that I might think about the situation a little bit, and see if I couldn't imagine a solution.

My ruminations came to nothing resembling brilliance. The best I could decide is that I should just write more, post more and hope for the best.

And that is exactly what I'm going to do. From this point forward I will write as much as I can, and post whatever seems good at the time. Writings relating to music will get posted to the Hollow Tree blog, and everything else will get posted here, at iSuck.

I'm afraid that music-oriented pieces will come at a less frequent rate then they have in the past. I just don't enjoy music the same way that I used to. Blame changes in playback technologies as much as changes in music itself. If I invested in an iPod I might listen to music more than I do now. But that's not entirely certain, because there would also have to be music that I'm interested in listening to.

So, that's that. By good luck and strong will I may be able to flood this blog over the coming weeks. I have little hope that my efforts will do anyone any good, but I've got to try. What else am I going to do?

-9/20/2007 18:12:12 Asheville, NC

Work-in-progress fiction, by Zeno Izen

2007-07-05T22:31:00.000+01:00

I promised myself that I wouldn't write any more fiction... Then I broke that promise, and now I can no longer trust myself.

This one isn't finished. The whole thing is written out in my head, I just need to type it out.

--

(yet to be titled)
by Zeno Izen

Foldeurs watched Nichette pull away from the curb and drive off into the fullness of the suburban foilage. He shut the front door and returned to the back sitting room. His wife Maylin was there, on the couch reading some papers from work. She had taken her shoes off and tucked her bare feet under herself.

"Are you cold? Should I turn the heat up?" he asked her.

"No," she answered, looking up from her work just long enough to make brief eye contact.

"I have to make a phone call," he said. He left the sitting room and went upstairs to the bedroom, where he began to change into some more comfortable clothes. While he changed clothes, he brought a cellphone out from a hidden cabinet in the closet. He had already taken his pants off and loosened his tie when he flipped open the phone and dialed the first number that came up. The line rang twice and a recorded voice came on, requesting a message.

"Walking Tall. He's going to do it," Foldeurs said. Just as he was hanging up, his wife came into the room. Foldeurs quickly but casually shut the closet door.

"I need my other glasses," Maylin said. She passed Foldeurs without glancing at him. Her reading glasses were in her hand. Without any glasses on, she was effectively blind. Foldeurs strode casually toward the bed, holding his cellphone near his thigh. He picked his pants up off the bed and slid the cellphone into one of its pockets.

"Did you make your phone call?" she asked him from the bathroom.

"Not yet," he said. "I wanted to get out of these clothes."
--

Opelle picked up the message three hours later when his plane landed at the Dallas-Ft. Worth airport. He erased the message and immediately called his hotel to have them relay a coded message to his office in Helsinki.

The following Monday, Nichette waited until his lunch break to sneak into the basement three floors below his office at the Department of Public Awareness. It took him ten minutes to find the disks he needed. He took the old elevator up to the parking garage where he had jumped the fence to bypass an electroic key checkpoint. While Nichette's authorization was easily high enough to allow him access to the basement, the computer at the main elevator would record which floor he had exited at. Sneaking in through the garage allowed him to remain "off site" in the Department's databases.

And besides, he could drop the disks off at his car on the way back out.

--

In Helsinki, they decoded the message with the help of a large metal folder full of stiff cardboard pages. They fed the results into a computer which returned to them a list of seven names. They recoded these names and sent them to an agent, who would leave by airplane to prepare the location.

--
Late Monday afternoon in Vancouver, Traj stepped up to the teller window at the bank.

"Hi. My card's not working," he said.

The teller smiled politely and took his card from his hand. She slid it through the card reader on her desk and tapped a button at her keyboard. A moment later she slid the card again. After one last try, she typed the card number into her desk terminal. After waiting a moment she returned Traj's card to him and said "I'm sorry, there is no account with that number."

"No that's impossible. I've been using this card all day," he said.

The teller smiled again, this time a little bit uncomforatbly, and then glanced over Traj's shoulder. Traj turned around and saw two very big security guards walking toward him.

"Sir, can you come with me please," one of the guards said to him.

"No, I haven't finished my business here," Traj said. Then he felt something splash onto his face. He looked up and past the two security guards, into the grand marble interior of the banking lobby. As everything went black, Traj thought how remarkable it was that such a magnificent room should be so empty of people.

--

Opelle went straight to his hotel when he arrived in Cincinnati. He could have picked up the goods immediately, but he preferred to pick them up at the last possible minute. The items had been in storage this long, they would be as safe as anywhere else if they stayed in their lock boxes until just before he left town in the morning.

At exactly the moment Opelle was taking his sleeping pill, his agent from Helsinki was boarding her connecting flight to Dubrovnik. Once in Dubrovnik, she would be taken by car up the Dalmatian coast to Orebic, on the far end of the Peljesac Peninsula. She would be given a hotel room, but she would not sleep. Instead she would watch television for an hour until the sun came up, at which point she would drive up to the clandestine facility over the hills and begin her work.

--

It was at about eleven o'clock on Tuesday morning when Foldeurs began to get tired of hiding behind the oleander bush. He looked again through his binoculars at the front step of the little chapel. For a great while nothing changed in his circular field of vision. Even the leaves on the small tree in front of the building remained still, protected as they were from breezes by the monolithic library on one side of chapel, and the
imposing wall of the science building which wrapped tightly around the chapels other side. Foldeurs lowered his binoculars again and reached into his pocket for his cell phone.

Just as he was dialing, splitting his attention between his cell phone screen and the distant chapel, he saw a figure walk around from behind the building. Foldeurs brought his binoculars to his eyes again and watched the figure climb the front steps and open the front door. Within a moment there was a flash of light followed by a pop that came so softly that Foldeurs was sure he wouldn't have heard it if he hadn't been listening for it.

He emerged from behind the oleander bush and hurried down the stairs toward his car. One and a half minutes later, he pulled up behind the chapel, where his assistant was just stepping out of a paper jumpsuit. Foldeurs popped the trunk on his oldsmobile and jumped out of the car. His assistant had stuffed the jumpsuit and latex gloves into a garbage bag. He handed this to Foldeurs who tossed it into the compartment where the spare tire was meant to be. Then the assistant handed Foldeurs a medium sized suitcase. The suitcase was clearly too large for the spare tire compartment, so Foldeurs handed it back to his assistant and shut both the compartment and the trunk. Both men got into the car and departed the area as quickly as possible without attracting any attention to themselves.

--more--

12-Step programs are not proven to be safe or effective

2007-06-25T17:50:00.000+01:00

Interesting line from Wikipedia's Bill W. page: "During the final month he even asked for a whisky once or twice, but was not given one. "

Bill W. is one of the co-founders of Alcoholic's Anonymous. He's dead now, of course. Poor guy couldn't even get a snort on his death bed. Now that's "cut off"!

A handy thing to remember is to look up controversial topics with the added search term "skepticism." I did that with Alcoholic Anonymous and found a post on the Cynical-C Blog that discusses the work of Professor George Vaillant of Harvard University. The post also links to this page at orange.papers.org.

Valliant's research is interesting enough, but I wish there were more studies on the subject. This article about the "alcoholism is a disease" concept at baldwinresearch.com is interesting. And there is at least one mention of the "disease" notion on the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe podcast. The host calls South Park the "definitive treatment of this topic in popular culture," which I think is strangely true.

This subject is really more important than a lot of people realize. Across the USA, many citizens are ordered by courts, companies and other organizations vested of a certain amount of authority, to attend Alcoholics Anonymous -- and other 12-Step programs. Yet neither the safety nor the effectiveness of these programs have really been proven.

Valliant's mention of "external supervision, substitute dependency, new caring relationships and increased spirituality" for the treatment of substance dependency seems reasonable, and one might wonder if these four factors might be employed more consciously rather than in the "serendipitous" manner of AA. If addiction is really a disease, or simply a disorder, shouldn't it be treated by a medical doctor? Perhaps the methods that have been proven to work might be separated from the secret society that has developed around them, combined with other proven supportive practices and given over to persons trained in the diagnosis and treatment of mental health problems.

Of course, between the inequities of our industrialized health care system, and our war on drugs which has so many people confused about the nature of substance dependence, it may not be possible or even wise to truly medicalize addiction treatment. Like the addict himself, our system for treating addictions has deep complex problems that are not always available to direct address.

However, the fact that substance abuse is a serious problem in our society is indisputable, and the fact the situation is not improving is also difficult to contradict. The 12-steppers themselves say that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. Considering the increasing availability of more and newer dangerous substances, the mounting number of persons killed, incarcerated or otherwise put out of commission and the law-enforcement and health-care resources devoted to these problems it appears that our societal trajectory on this issue might be entirely misaimed. Clearly, a change is needed.

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Head Shaving Ritual

2007-06-13T22:15:00.001+01:00

Well, I finally did it. I've been growing my hair out for more than a year now. But today I grabbed some scissors and hacked most of it off, and then shaved off what was with some lamb shears. Then I put the hair, about a pound of it, in a piece of butcher paper and wrapped it up into a little package.

I took the package of hair out to the fire pit in the back yard, soaked it in WD40 and set it on fire.

I did the deed not just because I was tired of having my hair in my eyes all the time, or even simply because I was tired of looking like a hippy. The act also served as a sort of ritual, a psychological underlining of a determination to disconnect myself from the unnessecary burdens that have been accumulating upon me for the past 17 months.

The last time I cut my hair was in January of 2007, when I started the job search that eventually situated me in the terrible night-shift job at the local hospital cafeteria. I quit that job on May 1 of this year, after the mounting stupidity of the situation finally crossed the cost-benefits threshhold. It's no coincidence that I quit on May 1, international labor day. Though I consider myself a rational atheist, I still ritualize things.

Religion is false and foolish, but I'm sure there are psychological effects to ritual activity. A good ritual, designed and choreographed by human beings can add a touch of symbolism to a person's life, shooting a feeling of narrative into what would seem an otherwise haphazard existence, devoid of independent control.

I can't say for sure that rituals actuallly work this way, but I'm prone to hypothesize that when we make our own rituals, we help ourselves feel like heroes in our own story. Sometimes confidence can make all the difference.

5:13 PM 6/13/2007
-Zeno Izen

Poem

2007-06-13T04:48:00.000+01:00

Here are some thick black lines
around white circles

Looking closely at a comic strip.

"Is that what thinking is like?"

Who can ever know? Deep down, we all would like to be telepathic.

Many of us try.

Wrong blog AGAIN

2007-03-24T21:16:00.000Z

Item moved.

What is wrong with me?

Oops, wrong blog.

2007-03-05T01:24:00.000Z

Item deleted.

New Year etc. blah blah

2007-01-02T17:29:00.000Z

Couple quick notes for the new year:

1. WWJD? JWUHMP! (Jesus would use his magic powers.)

2. Oklahoma Full Auto Shoot wins Keith Olbermann's "Oddball Event of 2006". You saw it here first.

3. I thought we were friends.

Christian Coalition declines moderation and practicality

2006-11-28T18:55:00.000Z

Bwa, ha ha. Heard too much about "where are the moderate Muslims"? Well, howsabout "where are the moderate Christians"? Looks like the Christian Coalition almost hired a captain to steer the ship toward a more kind, loving, Christlike agenda focused upon care for the poor and conservation of our planet.

But then, you know, stupider heads prevailed. Read the story:
Christian Coalition pres.-elect leaves

Eyelash Carpets at the 2006 Voodoo Fest (w/ photos)

2006-11-17T21:07:00.000Z

The Voodoo Festival, an annual music event in New Orleans, is over for 2006. I went down there this October with the Eyelash Carpets, who were invited to play at the Noo Moon stage on Sunday morning.

The day of the show was much like the rest of the trip, devoid of any truly remarkable events. I had expected nothing but chaos, as there were six of us traveling from North Carolina to New Orleans in two separate cars, and two more joining us once we arrived. Maybe my imagination is more vital than my faith in human beings. With eight of us involved in a long road trip and then an equipment-heavy musical performace, I was sure that something would go drastically wrong at some critical moment, making for an entertaining story which I could type up and post here.

But no, the Eyelash Carpets made it to the stage and performed their set without the slightest trouble. (I swear I'm going to start carrying fire crackers or something around with me.)

I did use up a couple of fun savers during the trip. (Visit the full gallery at 23hq.com.)

The Eyelash Carpets played courtesy of the Noo Moon Tribe, which hosted a side-stage area at the Voodoo Festival. There were two stages on a lawn at the edge of City Park, featuring a long list of local bands and DJs. The Carpets played at 11:11 am, which meant that the sun was bright and the audience was sparse. The Carpets are not designed for outdoor music festivals during the daytime. They are better suited to dark nightclubs full of fog machines and laser beams. But a gig's a gig, and the Carpets performed their set of psychogothic electronica with total perfection.

For the finale, Areck Laws joined the band to play piano on "Burning Kisses". This was probably the best part of the show. There were six musicians on stage, all adding parts to a complicated sonic object that pushed heavily in several directions but always kept its fingertips on the fundamental tempo, so that the whole thing evoked the impression of an elephant coming off of anaesthesia.

Afterwards, the band and its entourage broke up into groups and struck off to enjoy the rest of the festival. I caught some of the acts at the Noo Moon stage, and then went to see the Morning 40 Federation and get some of the food that was for sale at tents along the main lawn. After a couple hours, Pantopon Rose and I went back to Bunny's apartment to crash out. Bunny and Pulvis Opii showed up at Bunny's place a few hours later after seeing the Flaming Lips and Duran Duran. According to Bunny the Lips put on a mind-blowing, eye-popping show. I vaguely regretted missing this, but then I had been duly entertained when Ratty Scurvics, at the Noo Moon stage, passed out 75 hula hoops. Sitting in the middle of a crowd of 75 people spinning hoops around their waists and arms to the rythm of a single guy who plays drums and keyboard while screaming songs into a microphone is pretty mind blowing and eye popping in itself, even if it isn't as expensive as thousands of cubic feet of confetti and colored fog.

The Morning 40 Federation were also fun enough to constitute an entire day's entertainment. Just the fact of the band's being on such a large stage was an amusement. The one other time I've seen the Morning 40s play was at a tiny quasi-legal bar in slums of New Orleans. Their personnel has changed a little since that time, but they still play their purposefully degenerate rock and roll with unstable furvor. Their sound, which includes wicked saxaphone lines and playful song construction, perfectly reflects a facet of New Orleans' culture that has been underrecognized. The drunknen sunrise junkyard environment of the 9th ward, Bywater and Marigny neighborhoods of New Orleans breeds a perverse culture of fake furs, big sunglasses and old syringes sharpened against matchbook covers. Thrift-store chic mashed up with hungover psychosis combines into a sense of style that is too busy choking back the vomit to realise that it isn't slick enough to make it to the mainstream. But the Morning 40 Federation manage to transcend the debilitating effects of substance abuse in a city with no infrastructure to the point that they play live shows on a regular basis and grow in popularity with every passing year. The 40s have been a band for a long time, now, and they will remain a band for a long time to come. Certainly they will eventually put out an album under the auspices of some multinational record label, play the late night shows and have a radio hit. When that time comes, American culture will change in deep and subtle ways. These changes will likely coincide with an increase in the rate of our empire's decline, resulting in a normalization of daytime drinking and an overall decrease of personal responsibility. The Morning 40 Federation, and their kind, will be blamed for this acceleration of popular decadence, but remember this: they are only the messengers. The fact is that America is a failed concept. Democracy and liberty will eventually fold to unimpeachable timeless power of the feudal system, and as the optimism of our society fades away, there is nothing left to do but get loaded and dance around in the rubble.

At least, that is the message that I hear in sound of the Morning 40 Federation. And it seemed a painful message for many scowling people as we walked back across the main lawn away from the M40s performance. The words "Let's do some cocaine and talk talk talk" cut sharply through the air and seemed to stick like knives in the backs of the middle class kids that we passed on the way. I saw one young man stop in his tracks and turn angrily toward the distant stage at the sound of these words. I wanted to grab him by the collar of his Cheerios t-shirt and explain to him that the future is too big to fight. The ship is going down and you can either row far far away or be sucked down into the whirpool of your puritanical guilt.

But I didn't. Instead I got myself a barbecue pork sandwich and a lemonade and then I went back to Bunny's apartment and took a nap. We are not at the end of the world, only the slow deterioration of a world power, and life must still go on.

<-z>

Verdi, Vidi, Mangiato (Gastrotourism in New Orleans)

2006-11-05T21:23:00.000Z

You don't have to drink liquor to enjoy New Orleans. They've also got music and art and antiques and architecture and history and voodoo and people watching and especially food for your enjoyment.

Here's a summary of the food I've enjoyed during my stay in New Orleans.

Mimi's is a tapas restaurant upstairs from a bar in the Marigny. It took us forever to get a table here because there were approximately ten of us, and the place is not really design for large parties. I've seen this place cram packed well beyond capacity during Mardi Gras and perhaps one other time. They do a good job serving huge crowds with a small staff and limited space, as do many of the restaurants in New Orleans.

The dishes on the menu are all between four and seven dollars. The plates are four or five inches in diameter and each one is well presented, even during the most arduous of circumstances. I was completely famished when I ordered, not having eaten anything substantial in the last twelve hours or so. I ordered three tapas, the calamari in white wine sauce, a sliced, roast pork with some kind of spicy red sauce, and a bowl of mussels in tomato broth. All three were perfect, but the calamari was the best of them.

I could have eaten a great deal more, but this was enough for the moment, and at an average $5 per plate, I thought it better to QS my stomach later in the evening with something more affordable. No further opportunity to eat ever came that night, though. It wasn't until the middle of the following day that we went to the Napoleon House in the French Quarter.

The Napoleon House has what they call a "limited" menu during lunchtime. They should probably just call it a lunch menu so that patrons don't unconsciously feel like they're missing out on something. Or maybe use of the word "limited" motivates customers to return during dinner time.

Whatever the case, nothing on the menu really jumped out at me. When selecting from a menu, I often look for something that I can't get elsewhere, something that I haven't tried before or something that I think might be especially good at the establishment where I am eating. The Napoleon House seems to me to be oriented toward good cocktails and historic ambience, with food as a secondary consideration. Still, the food is good.

I ordered the roast beef po' boy, hold the mayonnaise. I do not like mayonnaise. There is a passage in an Edward Abbey book that I read many years ago in which Abbey rails against mayonnaise, reminding us that the stuff was invented by the French to cover up the taste of tainted meat. On the other hand, the Italians have created a version of mayonnaise, known to us all as aioli, which is simply mayonnaise with the innovative addition of a thing called "flavor". My own favorite is garlic aioli. I prefer the raw garlic to the roasted garlic. Raw garlic, in high doses, has a drug-like effect, both soporific and euphoric.

Mayonnaise on its own is not very good, though. It's fortunate that I ordered it off my roast beef sandwich, too, because the roast beef was coated in a glistening starch gravy that was already much more moisture than the bread and my napkin could handle. Halfway through the sandwich I had to resort to knife and fork.

The following evening we visited Angeli on Decatur Street. The wait was long because Decatur was hopping with Friday night partiers. We sat at the high table in the middle of the dining room, which was not the most comfortable table, but at least we didn't have to wait any longer.

I ordered the cheese calzone with roasted garlic (see above). Apparently the menu at Angeli has changed somewhat since the disasters. Once upon a time Angeli had oversized slices of their cheese and "Virtuous Angel" pizzas which could be bought for two dollars or so. Single slices are no longer on the menu, though. French fries have also been discontinued.

The Virtuous Angel pizza, which is still available as a whole pie, is rather good. The notable toppings are artichoke hearts and goat cheese, over the usual mozzarella and a sauce, which I don't recall exactly. Angeli has a classic red sauce and a white sauce on their pizzas, the red being the one that I would have to guess is on the VA. They also carry a breakfast pizza, with fresh eggs as the "sauce" and a choice of breakfast toppings, in addition to a handful of other specialty pizzas. Calzones are also available, with a list of ingredients that can be mixed and matched according to your taste.

I was surprised to find that my calzone looked as if the cook knew what he or she was doing. Four dehiscening slices graced the perfectly browned crust of the calzone, which was shaped into a perfect, natural looking crescent, twisted gently into points at each end. Inside the guts were hot, red and viscous. This meal hit the spot dead on, and I do believe I had the most epiphonous food experience of my trip there at that clumsy high table.

The menu at Angeli's includes mediterranean dishes such as hummus and gyros, along with a selection of sandwiches. The portabella sandwich is especially good for those who don't eat meat. The bar is fully stocked with liquor, beer and a few wines--which in New Orleans goes without saying. The restaurant is open all night on weekends and late during the week, and they also have a delivery service.

Among the various places that are open late in the French Quarter, Angeli definitely ranks as one of the best.

The next night we had pizza again from Sugar Park Tavern, which used to be Lorenzo's, in the 9th Ward. I didn't go in there. Pulvis Opii and Syd from the band picked up the pizza. However, an anonymous source tells me that the place smells like cat pee, "but there's no cat." The pizza is great, though. Thin crust with corn meal on the underside. Straight good 'zza, hold the bullshit.

There was a lot of other food consumed during this trip, but I won't mention it because I don't remember it all and if I try to write about it I'll just end up having to bother people with emails about "where was that place where we had that deep fried iguana?" and I'll never finish this post. I can tell you though that my diet was supplemented heavily with fig newtons, guava juice and Guarana Antarctica from Dora's on St. Claude. Dora's got a fine little shop and we can forgive her for the not-one-but-three George Bush stickers on her minivan.

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