we warned you, but would you listen? noooooooooooooo

Well, I mean, you can click if you want.

Computerworld (on-line tech news website)

Report:
Cell phone explosion
may have killed man

South Korea police found melted cell-phone battery in victim's shirt pocket

November 28, 2007 (Computerworld) -- Police in Cheongwon, South Korea, say a worker died Wednesday possibly because a cell phone battery exploded in his pocket, according to a report from the Associated Press.

The report quotes an unnamed police official as saying, "we presume that the cell phone battery exploded," but the official spoke on the condition of anonymity because the investigation continues.

The man was identified only as Suh, and was found dead at his workplace in a quarry Wednesday morning with a melted cell phone battery in his shirt pocket, according to the report.

The AP quoted the Yonhap news agency as saying Suh's body was examined by Kim Hoon, a doctor, who said that Suh suffered a burn in the left chest area and had a broken spine and ribs. "It is presumed that pressure caused by the explosion damaged his heart and lungs, leading to his death," the report quotes Hoon as saying.

South Korea's LG Electronics Inc. reportedly made the phone involved in the death, although the report quoted an LG official who said that a fatal explosion from the phone or its battery would be virtually impossible.

An LG spokeswoman said the company is investigating the report and would only confirm that the phone is not sold in the U.S.

- 30 -

every hectare of Antarctica without clouds

I'm going to Maine for 3 days. The coast. Crashing waves on boulders. Lighthouses. Lobsters in front of a roaring fireplace. Then I'll be back to finish my nervous breakdown over cleaning out this shitpit of an office so I can get my new supercomputer installed.

Meanwhile ... where should YOU go???

Go HERE! NOW!

some filched quotes about Lisp; some other stuff about programming languages and DNA computation

SQL, Lisp, and Haskell are the only programming languages that I've seen where one spends more time thinking than typing.

-- Philip Greenspun, March 2007

I suppose I should learn Lisp, but it seems so foreign.

-- Paul Graham, November 1983

One can even conjecture that Lisp owes its survival specifically to the fact that its programs are lists, which everyone, including me, has regarded as a disadvantage.

— John McCarthy, Inventor of Lisp, "Early History of Lisp"

Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad-hoc, informally-specified bug-ridden slow implementation of half of Common Lisp.

— Philip Greenspun, often called Greenspun's Tenth Rule of Programming

Please don't assume Lisp is only useful for Animation and Graphics, AI, Bioinformatics, B2B and E-Commerce, Data Mining, EDA/Semiconductor applications, Expert Systems, Finance, Intelligent Agents, Knowledge Management, Mechanical CAD, Modeling and Simulation, Natural Language, Optimization, Research, Risk Analysis, Scheduling, Telecom, and Web Authoring just because these are the only things they happened to list.

— Kent Pitman

Lisp has all the visual appeal of oatmeal with fingernail clippings mixed in.

— Larry Wall, creator of the Perl programming language

LISP being the most powerful and cleanest of languages, that's the language that the GNU project always prefers.

— Richard Stallman

the greatest single programming language ever designed

-- Alan Kay

[Emacs] is written in Lisp, which is the only computer language that is beautiful.

— Neal Stephenson, In the Beginning ... was the Command Line

A LISP programmer knows the value of everything, but the cost of nothing.

— Alan Perlis, Epigrams on Programming

QuickBASIC does everything C++ can do, only backwards and in high heels.

— Bob Merkin (with apologies to Ginger Rogers)

Forth isn't just a programming language. Or a development environment. It's a cult. People encounter Forth and leave their families and sell the house and car because the moment they first understand what Forth is and how it works, Forth is the only important thing in the world for the rest of their lives. What other high-level language gets a big write-up in Rolling Stone?

There is something New in programming hardware and software. For the last ten years, it's been possible to compute numerical and mathematical problems, and get your answers with incredible speed unmatched anywhere in the solid-state electronic world, using synthetically sequenced DNA in a petrie dish. The first problem that got answered with DNA computing was a many-mode Travelling Salesman Problem (TSP). DNA, of course, has been computing incredibly big problems at incredibly fast speeds since nucleic acid-based life began; it's how it reproduces life nearly error-free. But nobody ever thought to use this astonishingly powerful computing potential on human-conscious tailor-made problems before.

PizzaQ -- Win Pizza, prove you're Smarter than Rene Descartes!!! (Also come to a cool lecture!)

Click and maybe the image gets bigger.

So like here is the deal. According to this expert on Rene Descartes, Descartes said it was impossible to solve the above PizzaQ. So you're screwed, no Spongebob pizza slice for you.

Are you smarter than Rene Descartes? Ya think?

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Dear D***** S****,

Circumstances always conspire to prevent me from getting to your wonderful Spinoza events, but I thought your bunch might like a bit of notice about this very interesting and related talk. Who knows who might be wandering around western Massachusetts to take advantage of it?

And I must brag that this is a spectacularly beautiful picture-postcard mountains-and-forest corner of New England, gorgeous in every season.

I've been to several of Amherst College's open-to-all math talks, and they're all spectacular. Morever they're all aimed at a non-specialist audience that needs only the virtues of intelligence and curiosity. Every attendee is guaranteed to exit understanding considerably more about the topic, however arcane, than he knew going in. And this one promises to be heavy on the historical background -- intimately near Spinoza.

As for Descartes' conclusion, I learned how to calculate the length of a curve in 2nd semester calculus, so I guess that's proof that I'm smarter than Descartes.

Bob Merkin

==================

Amherst College
Amherst, Massachusetts USA
Department of Mathematics and Computer Science

Anders Oberg

[please put 2 horizontal dots over his O, they never come out right in my e-mail]

Uppsala University

and

Amherst College

Descartes and the Problem

of the Length of a Curve

In the Geometry (1637) Descartes said that it is not possible to determine the length of a curve in the following sense:

"... the ratios between straight and curved lines are not known, and I believe cannot be discovered by human minds, and therefore no conclusion based upon such ratios can be accepted ..."

I will discuss why Descartes may have thought so, which will lead us into many other interesting questions in the history and philosophy of mathematics.

Wednesday 5 December 2007
4 pm Seeley Mudd 206
Refreshments in Seeley Mudd 208 at 3:30 pm

[last time the refreshments were ... PIZZA!]

Mitt Romney sux the hairy wazoo / reply about the nasty push-polling / Giuliani in the Conservatory with the Lead Pipe

Jeff Fuller is a Louisiana (I think) opthalmologist who, with a dedicated band of like-minded bloggers, is vigorously pushing the presidential candidacy of Mitt Romney (Eeeek!), particularly in the key early battles in New Hampshire and Iowa. He left a Comment on my post about the ugly anti-Romney push-polling. I'm sincerely grateful for that; makes a Vleeptroid feel his coverage of the Hair and Teeth Campaign 2008 is noticed and might even have some pursuasive influence on this protracted never-ending supershallow psycho clown circus.

One of these days I'll post some stuff about LASIK surgery, which is advertised all over TV as the Miracle Wonder Cure for your out-of-focus eyeballs. Until then, if you're thinking of getting LASIK (Laser-Assisted in Situ Keratomileusis) surgery -- DON'T DO IT!!! Spend your money on a giant flat-screen hi-def TV instead.

==============

Yo Dr. Jeff --

Man, you're a hard dude to track down. Gotcha! (I think.)

On re-reading your Comment to my Vleeptron blog, I perceive a hint that you thought my post was finger-pointing at Romney, and that you felt it necessary to come galloping to Romney's defense.

Nope, the news articles had made it clear that Romney was the victim of the nasty push-polling, clearly not the instigator. So, yup, I don't like Romney (I live in Massachusetts, actually in its most liberal, progressive pocket), but no, my standards don't permit me to reach into a hazy situation of political anonymous dirty tricks and point fingers at whichever candidate I like the least. (Personally I think it was Giuliani in the Conservatory with the Lead Pipe.)

The original part of my post was just an informal historical and legal survey about a rather sad thing -- that creepy crap like this has always been endemic in American politics, and even sanctioned by both conservative and liberal Supreme Courts.

Now that I think about it, it was really rather remarkable that Nixon's Watergate dirty tricks rose to the level of actual federal felonies. (I guess burglaries and kidnapping schemes sort of cross the line even in American politics.)

The rest of my post was just an expression of personal disgust at the increasingly vile nature of the "professionals" whom the candidates hire in Campaign 2008. I suppose there are Americans I respect who can sing a paean to Fierce Competition as a great thing about America and its politics. But actually when Competition in politics gets out of control, I feel

1. We're all permitting huge damage to the developing personalities of kids; adults simply should be constrained from putting on this kind of grotesque show where young people can see it and draw conclusions from it, and

2. We risk contaminating and degenerating the original American vision of free and fair elections . Two more cycles like the way this one is shaping up, and American presidential elections will be indistinguishable from the "democratic elections" that Ferdinand Marcos perverted to hang on to perpetual power. And America will lose all its credibility as a champion and advocate for authentic democracy and free elections throughout the world. Our President. whoever that may be, will make grand speeches about spreading democracy throughout the world, and the world will roll around on the floor laughing at the emptiness and disengenuity of his/her words.

And now, my original and sincerely grateful reply to your Vleeptron comment. It's underneath your Comment, but I felt the whole subject was so important that I wanted to make sure I got it to you -- wherever the heck you are.

===============

Thanks, sincerely, very much, for dropping by Vleeptron with your comment about the nasty push-polling in Iowa and New Hampshire. Whoever's responsible -- candidate and push-pollers -- I hope they all wind up with felony convictions and prison sentences. (I know a lovely federal prison without fences or armed guards where the prisoners take care of wildlife in the forest.)

I am as admittedly a lefty (please don't confuse that as being a Democrat) as you and your blogs are admittedly pro-Romney, and I was particularly unhappy with Romney's campaign for and performance as Massachusetts (my state) governor. I believe no one in public office or politics today is as Hair and Teeth, and as lacking in substance, commitment or vision, as Mitt Romney.

Well, that's okay, the woods are filled with Hair and Teeth politicians from both major parties.

But I'm an Army veteran of the Vietnam war era, and his remarks about why his sons are doing more valuable work for America by assisting his campaign than serving and risking in the military during two major wars in Asia -- I found them personally insulting, and an elitist pissing on the young Americans who have found themselves pushed into the military because of rather hopeless economic civilian circumstances.

I wish just one of his boys -- like the Kennedy boys in World War Two, and Nixon's and Johnson's sons-in-law, and like the wealthy young Al Gore during Vietnam -- had the brains and guts to say, "Dad, I'm joining up to serve."

Leaders and their kids need to share the risk, particularly those leaders who think these ghastly new wars are necessary for America.

(I don't, I'll be voting for Paul or Kucinich at every opportunity.)

I'm a Jew, and kicking off his campaign at the Henry Ford Museum -- it wasn't anti-semitic. It was worse. It was proof that he's collected a staff, led by himself, who knows nothing about the rather public and infamous history of Henry Ford and American Jews. That Romney comes from a Detroit automobile family himself makes his cluelessness positively incredible and dangerous -- what cave in his Dad's mansion could he have been hiding in? I just don't want someone that stupid and ignorant in the White House.

Haven't meant to piss you off, and I truly appreciate your contribution to Vleeptron's coverage of this miserable, nasty, almost hopeless Hair and Teeth campaign. Please do it again.

Also thanks for being an opthalmologist, try to stay out of the LASIK racket. America's eyeballs just don't need that kind of greedy, medically useless and dangerous crap.

Bob Merkin

US Army 1969-1971 (I had Al Gore's same Army job!)

Northampton Massachusetts

=========

Jeff Fuller said...

It turns out that all those pointing to Mitt and/or his chief adviser (Gage) are already ending up with plenty of egg on their faces.

The "ROmney did it" theory doesn't even pass the smell test, and NRO and RedState sure have some "splainin" to do on this one.

http://iowansforromney.blogspot.com/2007/11/anti-romneyanti-mormon-push-polling-and.html
Tuesday, 20 November, 2007

a dyslexic dropout flies our souls through Crimson Skies, and resurrects a remarkable lost ara of Earth aviation

Oh do click the image, it gets dreamier.

Nearly my only relationship to video games is Frogger -- I sort of don't care whether the Frog gets across the 8-lane superhighway to safety or doesn't, I love the Squish noise -- and Crimson Skies, the version that runs on the old/original XBox.

S.W.M.B.O. loves Frogger -- she specifically loves the squished frog noise and may never have pushed a frog all the way across the superhighway, and briefly liked Crimson Skies, except that the superb flight simulation graphics make her airsick and she has to stop playing before she pukes.

I wrote an original computer game which is so perverted -- not sexually, just morally -- I was afraid to spread it around much. It has all the potential to attract the wrath of Hillary Rodham Clinton, Bill O'Reilly and Nancy Grace (I regret to report that she has reproduced, twice in one day), and to end me up with a lynch mob on my lawn.

I tend to think that the entire world of videogaming is wholly devoid of authentic imagination and soul-touching æsthetic beauty. Naturally this is to be expected of games intended for a 13-year-old boy audience.

But the XBox Crimson Skies just shocked me with its visual beauty and imagination. (Note the Brooklyn Bridge as "underdrop" to the Crimson Skies screenshot above.)

The characterizations are practically stupider than DC or Marvel comic books or original movies made for the Sci-Fi Channel.

But the flights of these remarkable imaginary propeller airplanes and derigibles from the 1930s reaches deeply into my soul and makes me want to sell it to the devil for a chance to fly one of these airplanes which never existed.

Never -- but almost existed. In the Real World, the 1930s were an era of astonishingly imaginative development of high-performance high-speed propeller aircraft, many of the most remarkable of these still insisting that wood was the perfect airframe, wing and propeller material rather than aluminum. In the midst of the Great Depression, this super-expensive vanity industry should have died at birth; no financier in his right mind should have spent a dime to pursue this insane sport.

But in fact a very few visionaries in the militaries of Europe and the United States shadow-funded and encouraged the most outlandish of these overpowered engines (Rolls-Royce a leader among them) and envelope-pushing wing and airframe designs. They knew a global war was coming and knew that control of the skies would be key to deciding which side won. So they secretly encouraged and funded playboy aviators -- the industrial playboy heir Howard Hughes, the Army aviator Jimmy Doolittle -- and wildly competitive air and aerobatic races, like Formula One car races on the ground, sprang up all over the world.

All these astonishing airplanes lacked were machine guns, bombs and torpedoes. When war finally came, these were simple afterthoughts to bolt onto the astonishingly fast and maneuverable airplanes that had evolved through the sporting competitions and broken the speed, height, climb and aerobatics records. One of Hughes' designs, which he was unable to sell to the US military before the war, reappeared over the Pacific as the Japanese Zero fighter plane. The British Spitfire was the direct child of the sport competitions of the 1930s.

Crimson Skies fantasizes that this era of envelope-pushing propeller aircraft never ended, but produced astonishingly high-performance high-speed planes that simply take your breath away. With machine guns, for dogfights and to blow up super-dirigibles floating on flammable hydrogen (rather than inert helium) which filled the world's skies.

The postage stamp artist Donald Evans, whose work flourished in the 1960s and early 1970s, was also fixated with dirigibles, and his imaginary nation of Mangiare (Italian for "eating"; Evans loved Euro food) was the world leader in dirigible production. Few remember, but in the real world, huge German dirigibles ran regular luxury passenger service from Europe to South America during the 1930s. Dirigibles and blimps -- lighter-than-air craft -- match and float along with the wind currents, and passengers ride in almost perfect comfort, free of all turbulence. When the war came, dirigibles (rigid internal frames) had vanished, but blimps played important roles in anti-aircraft defense and were the perfect long-range extended patrol anti-submarine hunters and killers.

The coolest part of Crimson Skies is flying at a giant enemy dirigible and blowing it to flaming smithereens with your machine guns.

Crimson Skies just can't let go of this marvelous era of thrilling flight. It exists in PC versions, but Microsoft dumped a lot of money into pushing its graphics to the extreme in the XBox version.

I don't play Crimson Skies very much -- but I dream about it often. It's this damn gravity. Though we can't live without it and would sicken and die if it went away, we look up and see migrating geese, and hawks and eagles, and soaring seabirds, and they infect our dreams.

Last week in Lisbon, just a few meters above the Tagus, the world's remaining propeller aerobatic speed crazies held one of the world's great pylon-dodging air races. It looked thrilling.

William Faulkner was a World War One aviator in France, and afterwards wrote an exciting and brutal novel about aerobatic barnstormer competition pilots called "Pylon." Also from this era, Antoine de Saint Exupéry ("Le Petit Prince," "Vol du Nuit") was a mail pilot in the Sahara and over the Andes. (Wikipedia: He disappeared on the night of July 31, 1944 while flying on a [Free French] mission to collect data on German troop movements.)

Though male-dominated (Amelia Earhart's financial backers practically forbade her from actually flying her transatlantic plane, and she was usually under the command of an alcoholic male pilot), almost all Caucasian, and very heavy on wealthy playboys, this pioneer era of aviation also included the remarkable African-American aviatrix Bessie Coleman, child of Texas sharecroppers, who had to travel to France to get flight training and a pilot's license. She was killed in a barnstorming exhibition accident in Florida.

The disease that makes human beings want to climb into impossibly dangerous machines and fly is one of the most virulent and incurable of all psychological ailments. Usually it only takes one glimpse of somebody else flying overhead in an airplane to catch the disease. They are so close to sudden death, they are so near to the most living human beings can experience.

===============
from Wikipedia:
===============

Crimson Skies is an alternate history universe, created by Jordan Weisman and Dave McCoy, that has spawned a number of games and novels. Crimson Skies began as a pitch for a game called Corsairs! for the Virtual World location-based entertainment centers. The project was eventually shelved, but the developers saved the idea and redeveloped into a board game simulating aerial combat that was introduced by FASA in 1998.

In 2000, Zipper Interactive developed the property into a computer game, which was published by Microsoft. In 2003, it returned as Crimson Skies: High Road to Revenge for the Xbox, as well as a collectible miniature games from WizKids,it is speculated of a sequel, that will be launched probabily in 2009 for Xbox 360 and PC ...

The stories and games in Crimson Skies take place in an alternate history version of the United States, where the nation crumbled into many hostile nation-states following the effects of the Great War, Prohibition, and the Great Depression. With the road and railway system destroyed, commerce took to the skies. Great cargo zeppelins escorted by fighter squadrons are the targets of many ruthless air pirates and enemy countries. Crimson Skies PC game.

When FASA Interactive joined Microsoft in 1999, Weisman had the opportunity to start a new project, and Crimson Skies was at the top of his list. This combat flight-sim offered game players fast-paced action without the hassle of realistic flight mechanics. The game included a 24-mission single-player mode and an on-line multi-player mode. Both modes made use of twelve different customizable plane designs.

The spirit of a pulp fiction novel was well captured with catchy pirate music, excellent voice acting, and great attention to detail. Unfortunately, the original release was plagued with bugs that would cause the game to freeze or crash; a patch was released to alleviate these problems.

The character of Nathan Zachary, leader of the Fortune Hunters, was introduced as the hero. He is an air pirate with a honorable slant and a concrete rule that only the wealthy will be victimized, characteristics reminiscent of Robin Hood. In fact, when a rival alludes to his aerial swashbuckling, he replies, "Let's get one thing straight, sister: Errol Flynn pretends to be me, not the other way around."

The single-player campaign chronicled the rise of the Fortune Hunters gang (with their base airship known as the Pandora) from relatively small-time thrill seekers to a renowned band of brigands, taking whichever side of the law is most convenient and profitable at that particular moment. The game was developed by Zipper Interactive and was nominated for the 2000 PC Action/Adventure Game of the Year from the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences, and won the Editor's Choice Award from Game Revolution, and GameSpy's Game of the Year for sound.

================

Jordan Weisman is an American game designer and serial entrepreneur who has founded four major game design companies, each in a different game genre and segment of the industry. Weisman graduated from Francis W. Parker High School, in Chicago, Illinois. He went to the Merchant Marin Acadamey and briefly attended University of Illinois at Chicago, before leaving school to pursue his business interests ...

==================
from The Escapist:
==================
Number of the Beast by Shannon Drake, 28 Nov 2006 7:02 am

While Jordan Weisman guided Microsoft's game division to respectability, worked on the cutting edge with Virtual World centers, started a cool miniature gaming company and currently heads up a bleeding edge ARG design firm, he describes his background with a simple, "Let's see. I was a college dropout who founded FASA." Founded in 1980 by Weisman and a partner, FASA - short for Freedonia Aeronautics and Space Administration, after Groucho Marx's fictional country in Duck Soup - was a tabletop gaming company known for legendary franchises like Shadowrun and Battletech before becoming one of the flagship developers in Microsoft's efforts to legitimize itself in gaming. Going back a little further, Weisman describes himself as "a severe dyslexic growing up, and [I] had bluffed my way through school until about age 16. I succeeded in never actually reading a book up to that age, as many dyslexics do. You become very good at cramming your way through that kind of stuff." Dungeons & Dragons changed all that. "[When] I was a camp counselor up in Wisconsin, one of the other counselors discovered the game and brought it to camp and got me involved in it. It was a very eye-opening experience. It was this complex, immersive entertainment experience that really made you think, that made you collaborate with your peers, socialize and problem solve. It was like nothing else I'd seen." More importantly, "It also finally forced me to read, because there was no way to cheat through it. If I wanted to start telling my own stories and running my own games, I needed to read those damn books. And I also needed to read Tolkien, so I understood what the hell an elf was, and Sauron, and orcs. ... It was part of a big turning point for me." He says he "really fell in love with the concept of creating that kind of immersive social entertainment. I did that through what was left of high school and my abortive college career and then decided to go pro, if you will, [by] starting FASA."

========================
back to Planet Vleeptron
========================

Hmmm this doesn't bode well for the human race. People who love video games can't spell "Merchant Marine Academy."

Æsthetic of the Future

Of course certainly click for larger.

Filched from a game development site.

They're all different. So you must like some of them more than you like others.

Maybe suddenly you just fell head-over-heels crazy in love with one, while all the others can just skate as far as you're concerned. Love At First Sight is just like that.

This is the only glimpse of these cyberbabes you'll ever get. You can't take them out to a restaurant and chat. You can't sit in a car with them at night and suck face. I have no way to find and display anything about them south of the neck. I'm sorry they have no hair (but this is the future -- maybe that's the way they like it that way, maybe it's hairless babes from now on).

So choose, just the way you'd choose your potential love mate in a crowded, dark meat bar. Focus. Get excited. Identify the one you've chosen out of 32 by letter and number, like c4.

Then Leave A Comment and write a paragraph about why she's different, why she's the best, why you must search the universe to find her so you can tell her of your intense feelings.

If some of you choose different cyberbabes, leave more Comments and fight about why the other one's choice is a total bow-wow, but yours is the most beautiful woman who never lived.

Vleeptron wants to start early to prepare you for the world of Love and Romance in the future. All the bank tellers have already been replaced by ATMs, all the phone operators have been replaced by automated voices with push-button menus. Soon all the women you might fall in love with will be replaced by digital simulations. Get ready. It's coming.

Publicke Notice

Top image Copyright 2007 by Ron Bizer, All Rights Reserved

Publicke Notice

In order of importance:

1. On Saturday in the USA state shaped like the palm of the right hand, the University of Michigan Wolverines lost to their ancient arch-rivals, the Ohio State University Slime Moulds, 14-3.

(I am talking USA college football here, not to be confused with what the rest of Earth calls football, which Americans call soccer. Beckham, who now plays for Los Angeles, constantly has to be reminded to call his sport soccer rather than football. I think his new bosses fine him $10,000 every time he says "footie" or "football" in public.)

Once again, Ann Arbor is in profound mourning. They will not be able to go to the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, California (but the Slime Moulds will).

And to help my old army buddy Ron, who lives in the USA state shaped like the palm of the right hand, I wasted a perfectly good virgin. And all the public health surveys of National Youth Sexual Behavior say that these are Very Rare.

U-Michigan ended up with a season so dismal that their beloved old football coach has resigned, or retired. Here is Ron's depiction of the Spirit of Ann Arbor this week.

2. Whether you are a Believer or Not, it will qualify as an Authentic Religious Miracle if this post actually gets posted to Vleeptron and you read it. My computer is kaput, in its Final Moments, and it took me literally 23 tries to restart it today to get it up again just enough to get into Vleeptron and my e-mail.

This thing could go Black Forever at any instant. So if you have Left A Comment, or any e-business between us is Pending and you are wondering why the hell I am ignoring you -- it's because electronically, things are Very, Very, Very sick and thready.

It is Last Rites time, Extreme Unction City, for the old piece-o-crap Hewlett Packard/WindowsME.

THE GOOD NEWS!!!! My Tek Todd phoned this morning, and the New Vleeptron Yawn-o-Tronic 7000 has arrived, and is ready to be installed at my convenience!

I was tempted to scream RIGHT NOW!!!! BRING IT HERE RIGHT NOW!!! but I got a little control over myself and have postponed it until Monday -- because my office looks very much like the news images from Bangladesh this week. This room is The Mother Of All Shit Pits, and I need to spend a few days shoveling it out to make decent, hygienic space for the Wonderful New Vleeptron Supercomputer.

Right now I would be ashamed to let a tree sloth who hangs upside-down and shits on himself into my office, let alone my Tek Todd. I am particularly embarrassed about the dead Girl Scout in the corner. I had nothing to do with it, she rang the doorbell and then suddenly choked to death on her own cookies.

So please bear with me if Vleeptron and Bob are slow or absent from Cyberspace for the next week. All kinds of Snazzy e-Miracles will shortly resume when the new Yawn-o-Tronic 7000 is humming along in Vista or ubuntu, which Tek Todd hath given his blessing to.

art filched from child / autistic kids and robots / uncomplicated love / horse who does arithmetic & talking dog

Of course, please click if you wish.

I was looking around for images of polygons and bumped into this, and filched it.

This has nothing to do with Kevin and his excellent robot, but when I studied psychology (don't get all excited, just one semester), we had to read about autistic children. Some of the most withdrawn, who rejected all social contact and interaction with human beings, were spontaneously fascinated with robots, and constructed elaborate artistic interactions with robots.

Since then, real robots have become enormously sophisticated -- including robots with quite sophisticated animated facial features that smile, frown, etc., not to mention sophisticated robot voices. I wonder how well autistic children warm to these real robots which are not of their own artistic invention.

Elvis Costello sings a plaintive love wail in which he yearns for one virtue in a romantic partner: Uncomplicated. Good luck. But that's what the spirit of the robot offers: Not necessarily unconditional love, like a cat or dog, but an Uncomplicated relationship without surprises, betrayal, mood swings. That must be terribly appealing to some personalities. A recent television documentary looked into the world of (I think just) men who spend thousands of dollars on gorgeous and highly realistic-looking female mannequins -- well, sex dolls -- but who build entire elaborate romantic partnerships with them. The documentary also looked deeply into the culture and community of the factory that builds these expensive mannequins, the attention they quickly learn to lavish on the products they make and sell, how the employees soon come to understand how important the mannequins are to each customer.

I don't know what a Diamel is. I don't know about dogs which can tell your fortune, but in 19th-century Europe there was an extremely famous performing horse which could answer very complicated arithmetic problems. We learned about him in psychology class too.

Guy goes into a bar, he has a dog. He tells the bartender he's broke but he doesn't want free drinks. "Look, the dog can talk. If the dog talks, will you give me drinks?" The bartender is already pretty annoyed at this business, but not much is happening and he is a little bored so he tells the guy to go ahead. The guy puts the dog on the bar and asks:

"What's on top of a house?"

The dog says: "ROOF!"

The bartender frowns.

"Wait a second! Wait a second!" the guy says. "Okay. What's wrapped around a tree?"

The dog says: "BARK!"

The bartender frowns more deeply.

"Wait a second! Wait a second!" the guy says. "Okay. Who was the greatest baseball player who ever lived?"

The dog says: "RUTH!"

That's enough for the bartender, who throws the guy and the dog out of the bar and into the gutter.

The dog looks up at the guy and asks: "DIMAGGIO?"

~ ~ ~

Uncomplicated

by Elvis Costello
from the album "Blood and Chocolate" (1986)

Blood and Chocolate
I hope you're satisfied what you have done
You think it's over now
But we've only just begun

I asked for water
And they gave me rose' wine
A horse that knows arithmetic
And a dog that tells your fortune

[Chorus:]

It's in your eyes
It's in your eyes
Uncomplicated

I want to buy you
A big blue Diamel
Cheap white plastic shoes
That don't walk out and don't let in

I want to show you
How I love you
When you're over me
There's no-one above you

[Chorus]

You think it's over now
But this is only the beginning

[Chorus]

Flying Spaghetti Monster Xmas tree ornament / Christmas in Prison

I'm too lazy to hunt down where you can buy this thing, but it's out there and for sale, just in time for Christmas. It's the Flying Spaghetti Monster Christmas Tree Ornament!

You can have your Christmas Tree, and also celebrate an extremely popular alternative Theory of Creation.

When S.W.M.B.O. isn't at home during Yuletide, I like to play my CD "Bummed Out Christmas," which includes the John Prine classic, "Christmas in Prison." Everybody grab your harmonica and sing!

Christmas in Prison

It was christmas in prison
And the food was real good
We had turkey and pistols
Carved out of wood
And I dream of her always
Even when I dont dream
Her names on my tongue
And her bloods in my stream.

Chorus:

Wait awhile eternity
Old mother natures got nothing on me
Come to me
Run to me
Come to me, now
Were rolling
My sweetheart
Were flowing
By god!

She reminds me of a chess game
With someone I admire
Or a picnic in the rain
After a prairie fire
Her heart is as big
As this whole goddamn jail
And shes sweeter than saccharine
At a drug store sale.

Chorus:

The search light in the big yard
Swings round with the gun
And spotlights the snowflakes
Like the dust in the sun
Its christmas in prison
Therell be music tonight
Ill probably get homesick
I love you. goodnight.

Archival postage stamp / Tierra de los Sueños / the Quadrature / die Quadratur

Please click on the image.

Any questions? Leave a Comment. If you Leave a Comment in which you ask a question, I will try to answer the question.

This is part of Vleeptron's desperate attempt to flee from This Ghastly, Wretched Moment on Planet Earth, from the Iraq War, from USA Campaign 2008, from the cruelty and repression of the military junta in Myanmar, from Scoundrels, Madness, Hatred, Violence, Greed, Lies & Fear; and to flee toward Beauty, Truth & Perfection, and to Times Past when Human Beings could be proud of their remarkable and Enlightened accomplishments.

There is no date on this old postage stamp from Tierra de los Sueños (Dreamland), but historical indications suggest it was issued sometime between 1637 and 1684 A.D. Like all the postage stamps of Tierra de los Sueños, it is a dream someone once had, or may be having now, or may dream in the future.

Please give a home in your mind and heart to very old things that were Beautiful and Good, and pass them along to others.

Pharm Party!!! the legend behind the Rush Limbaugh mosaic of 10,000 prescription painkillers

Why certainly, please
click on image for larger.

Oh, about the Subject ... according to Urban Legend, a "Pharm Party" is the new way high school kids combine their social life with their drug ingestion ... Before Friday or Saturday night rolls around, all the kids rifle through their rents' medicine cabinets for any prescription pills which might be recreationally thrilling or interesting, and they bring them to the Pharm Party and pass them around.

It's the kind of "Oh no! It's the End of the World!" kind of urban legend which War On Drugs creeps use to shape public policy by spreading Fear, Panic and, in this case, by stirring up the natural Hatred that older people (i.e. voters) traditionally feel toward kids (i.e., un-enfranchised non-voters).

I went to a Rave once! Really! I did! Me! And a few times I've actually Moshed! (I am the Fred Astaire of Slam-Dancing!)

So if you've ever actually been to a real, authentic Pharm Party, please Leave A Comment and tell us all about it. We want to hear all about you wicked teenagers doing stolen illegal drugs which your poor, hard-working, sacrificing parents truly needed for their authentic illnesses.

Then tell us all about the crazy meaningless unprotected teenage sex you had after you got all fucked up on the illegal drugs.

If you invited 492 of your closest friends to the Pharm Party and they totally trashed somebody's nice suburban house while their rents were out of town for the weekend, let us know all about that, too.

~ ~ ~

Well screw the mosaic picture of Rush Limbaugh, he's just the biggest and most damaging asshole in American politics, I don't want his image on Vleeptron.

But besides being a professional asshole, he also has an authentic illness -- addiction to prescription painkillers -- and illness and addiction can happen to anybody. Guy needs medical help, not cops and prosecutors, but that's how we deal with addiction and substance abuse in the USA -- we don't call a doctor or nurse or an addiction specialist, we call a cop and a prosecutor and a prison guard.

As a national plan and strategy, btw, how's that working?

Anyway, like their mosaic of George W. Bush made of 1200 assholes, artofresistance.org made a mosaic of Limbaugh out of thousands of pharmaceutical painkillers. Here's the legend of the various pills.

Oxycontin/oxycodone, a synthetic opiate, has acquired the street nickname "Hillbilly Heroin" because of its early popularity as an underground diverted addiction drug in the US Appalachian regions like Tennessee and Kentucky. But a great powerful painkiller is a great powerful painkiller, and these wildly popular pills have spread far beyond the Appalachians.

I'll have more to say about Pain, Painkillers, Pain Management, Police, Prosecutors, Prisons and Health Professionals. It's a fascinating realm of public health policy.

It wouldn't be so miserably fascinating if the US federal government didn't have its head stuck so far up its butt for so many decades.

In Europe there are a lot of countries that deal with all substance abuse and addiction problems strictly as health and public health issues, and the cops play no part in it.

Well, when I write Letters to the Editor about this subject, I like to ask:

If your child had a drug problem, whom would you call? 911 or your family doctor? So why do we make laws and public policy that demand we do just the opposite if the sick person is a stranger rather than a family member?

PizzaQ mosaic winner! Thousands of assholes! Thousands of assholes!

This image is a mosaic composed of 1200 small photographic similar elements. What are the elements? 4 Slices with endives, garlic, shallots.

***********

Okay, the graphic was created by artofresistance.org , who also have a nifty mosaic of Rush Limbaugh composed entirely of powerfully addictive painkiller pills which are controlled substances.

==========

3 Comments:

ryanshaunkelly said...

Gravel kucinich paul nader perot carter [conyers?rangel?] united for truth elicit fear smear blacklist.

The people know too much,
democracy rising democracy now.
Rage against the machine.

Honesty compassion intelligence guts.

No more extortion blackmail bribery division.
Divided we fall.
Friday, 16 November, 2007

Mike said...

Well, uh, maybe he got the answer before I did, but if not, he's a giant mosaic of assholes.
Friday, 16 November, 2007

Jim Olson said...

ahh...mike beat me. The prolapsed rectums are particularly unappealing.
Friday, 16 November, 2007

=========

Okay, no pizza for ryanshaunkelly. You're not even trying, guy.

Mike wins the Pizza!

Hahahahaha, for 4 slices of pizza, I made him say: "assholes."

This presidential campaign and the War in Iraq are infecting me with Tourette's Syndrome.

Gets shittier / a Plague on all their houses

The US state of New Hampshire holds the presidential campaign's first voter primary election, and Iowa holds a political caucus, a candidates' popularity poll. Both events attract a huge amount of media and voter attention, and are the first major hurdles that can greatly boost a candidate's fortunes or dash them. Before these events, both states become hubs of intense political activity -- television and radio advertising blitzes, multiple visits and big public events by candidates ...

And this kind of crap.

Look, if this is how the major candidates are going to run for president, why don't we all just sit out the entire campaign? Let the political professionals disgust everyone, piss on the whole democratic election process, bend the laws, break the laws, get indicted, get sent to prison -- but we can all set personal limits for how much of it we have to get involved in. A plague on all their houses.

For what little it's worth, this isn't really new in American politics, which have always been (to use a charitable term) rough and tumble.

A scandal-monger dogged and stalked Thomas Jefferson, spreading lies (and a few ugly truths) throughout Jefferson's political career.

As Abraham Lincoln's political star began to rise in Illinois, he secretly purchased a German-language newspaper with a large immigrant readership, and used it to plant anonymous personal attacks against his political rival (the typical accusation of fostering an illigitimate child). Years later Lincoln admitted to this episode and said it was the only moment of his political career he deeply regretted.

But American politics have always acted as a shit magnet, powerfully drawing the worst creeps and sociopaths in public life, and for the motives of political power and huge sums of money, the campaigns voyage through a Dark Zone completely devoid of Ethics, Morals, Decency, Truth, or Community. Along the way, federal and state election laws are regularly broken, the Rule of Law in a Democracy takes a holiday, and lying and fraud are elevated to high professional technologies. Any amount of damage, to the personal lives of innocent individuals, or to entire communities, is just the way the cookie crumbles. It's the American Way.

Because New Hampshire has election laws which seem specifically to forbid the kinds of telephone activities that have been occurring there as the hotly contested primary nears, the state's Attorney General appears to have already begun looking into these activities. If the laws are clear and Constitutional, some of these creeps and sociopaths may have already crossed the line which will land them in a state prison.

However, in general, the U.S. Supreme Court, both in liberal and conservative eras, has tended to protect many of the nastiest political campaign activities and immunize them from criminal strictures and punishments. Political elections are considered the nation's ultimate test of Free Speech, and court decisions suggest that legislative efforts to "sanitize" campaigns and force politicians and their creepy subordinates to "behave" violate the letter and spirit of free political speech.

Even the right to distribute negative political literature anonymously (during an Illinois race) has been declared a form of protected free political speech, which states cannot constitutionally forbid. You can wear a mask and use a false name; that's how we do things in politics.

A plague on all their houses. America is in the process of choosing the most powerful official on Planet Earth, whose decisions and leadership will effect the lives literally of billions of human beings and of all living things on Earth, and we seem obsessed and addicted to doing it in the filthiest, most immoral, unethical, fraudulent, and shallowest way imaginable.

For a year or more, love, romance, wooing, dating and consentual sex take a holiday, and we dive into a national celebration of date rape and gang rape. After the next president is inaugurated, one or two of the worst professional serial rapists might say he or she is sorry a little bit. (The guy who cooked up the Willie Horton ad eventually said he was sorry.)

===============

The Chicago Tribune (daily Illinois USA)
Friday 16 November 2007

New Hampshire investigates
anti-Romney calls

McCain joins rival in condemning "push poll"

by Jill Zuckman, Tribune national correspondent
jzuckman@tribune.com

CONCORD, New Hampshire -- The GOP presidential campaigns of Mitt Romney and John McCain -- rocked in different ways by a highly negative "push poll" targeting Romney's Mormon faith -- demanded Friday that the New Hampshire attorney general investigate who is behind the tactic.

The attorney general's office said it was investigating the phone calls.

As part of the poll, which began Sunday, callers have been asking voters in Iowa and New Hampshire whether they know that Romney is a Mormon, that his five sons did not serve in the military and that Mormons believe the Book of Mormon is superior to the Bible.

The callers also inquire if voters are aware that Romney, the former Massachusetts governor, accepted deferments to avoid military service in Vietnam while he was on a mission with other young Mormons in France.

At the beginning of the 20-minute survey, voters are asked whether they are aware of McCain's decorated military service [Navy combat pilot, later prisoner of war] during Vietnam. That has led many voters to assume the poll was sponsored by the Arizona senator's campaign. But McCain's campaign immediately denounced the effort and insisted it had nothing to do with it.

"Whoever did this wanted to hurt us by implication," said Mark Salter, a senior aide to McCain. "That's why we were very forceful."

Romney's supporters have long feared that a shadowy whispering campaign would arise at some point targeting his Mormon faith. The new push poll may be the most explicit anti-Mormon message to emerge in the campaign so far.

But Dean Spiliotes, a New Hampshire political analyst and founder of NHpoliticalcapital.com, said the attack may inadvertently help Romney.

"It certainly gives Romney a platform to speak about his religion, something that people have advised him to do," Spiliotes said. "It may also get him some sympathy from voters who don't like seeing religion mixed so intimately with politics."

Push polling, in which negative information is disseminated under the guise of a poll, is a well-known tactic, if a widely condemned one.

Former Rep. Chuck Douglas (R-N.H.), vice chairman of McCain's New Hampshire campaign, handed his complaint to Deputy New Hampshire Atty. Gen. Orville Brewster Fitch II on Friday, calling the phone calls "repugnant.

"We find the whole thing a very bad trend eight weeks before the primary," Douglas told Fitch.

Aides to Sen. Judd Gregg (R-N.H.) also filed a complaint with the state's attorney general on behalf of the Romney campaign. Campaign officials said they are providing names of people who received the calls.

"Whichever campaign is engaging in this type of awful religious bigotry as a line of political attack, it is repulsive and to put it bluntly un-American," said Romney communications director Matt Rhoades. "There is no excuse for these attacks. Gov. Romney is campaigning as an optimist who wants to lead the nation. These attacks are just the opposite. They are ugly and divisive."

Leaders of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints [proper name of the Mormon church] say the church embraces the truths accepted by other Christians, but also accepts "additional information" from later revelations.

Campaigning in Las Vegas, Romney called the poll "un-American." And he essentially blamed McCain, saying it was a direct result of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance legislation, which he said has been "ineffective" in removing special-interest money from campaigns.

Aides to McCain pointed out that before the legislation was ever passed, McCain was a victim of push polling in South Carolina during the 2000 presidential primary.

"It is appalling, but not surprising, that Mitt Romney would seek to take advantage of this disturbing incident to launch yet another hypocritical attack," said Jill Hazelbaker, McCain's spokeswoman. "It's the hallmark of his campaign."

New Hampshire law requires all political ads -- including phone calls -- to identify the candidate behind the effort, or at least the candidate who is being supported. The push polling calls were made by Western Wats, based in Utah, and did not identify a candidate that the calls were intended to help or hurt.

Previous news reports have linked calls by Western Wats to the Tarrance Group, which works for former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani. Ed Goeas, the head of the Tarrance Group, told the Associated Press that there is no connection between Giuliani and Western Wats.

Katie Levinson, Giuliani's communications director, said there is no room for push polls in the campaign.

"Our campaign does not support or engage in these types of tactics and it is our hope other campaigns will adhere to the same policy," she said.

McCain, who arrived in New Hampshire Friday for a three-day swing through the northern and western parts of the state, called the phone calls "cowardly.

"I call on all other candidates and their supporters to repudiate these attacks and join me in pledging not to engage in such despicable tactics throughout the balance of this campaign," McCain said.

During the 2000 presidential race, South Carolina voters received phone calls and pamphlets alleging that McCain's wife, Cindy, was a drug addict, and that McCain had an illegitimate black daughter. The whispering campaign also suggested that McCain was mentally unbalanced after spending 5 1/2 years as a prisoner of war in Hanoi.

Following the South Carolina primary, which McCain lost, McCain's campaign made thousands of "Catholic voter alert" calls in Michigan informing voters that then-Gov. George W. Bush had appeared at Bob Jones University and describing Jones, the institution's leader, as someone with a history of anti-Catholic statements.

The phone calls infuriated Bush, who said he did not like being called a bigot. McCain won Michigan by 6 percentage points, but lost the Republican nomination.

- 30 -

Copyright © 2007 Chicago Tribune

University of Michigan vs. Ohio State play The Big Game Saturday at noon in Ann Arbor

The winner gets invited to play in the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, California. Sorry about the virgin. This is very important.

=========

e-mail from my old Army buddy who lives in the USA state shaped like the palm of the right hand.

The socks he's referring to -- a relative of mine went to U-Michigan, and left instructions that when he died, he wanted to be buried in his University of Michigan socks. He was.

The rivalry between U-Michigan and Ohio State is one of the oldest and most ferocious in college football.

========

Bob,

Time to send the good vibes to Ann Arbor for the big game with Ohio State. Despite our not so great year of football (8-3, 6-1 Big Ten) we are tied for first in the Big Ten with arch rival Ohio State. Winning tomorrow means a trip to the Rose Bowl. Put on those U of M socks!

GO BLUE!

=============
Bob replies:
============

Our prayers and sacrifices are with you.

how political professionals (and, under NH law, criminals) are helping voters choose the next president

My, isn't this attractive?

Romney isn't the last person on Earth I want as president. He's probably in a tie for that honor with Giuliani, McCain, Fred Thompson, and Hillary Rodham Clinton. Whom have I forgotten? Who else rises to the level of Last Person On Earth who should be the next president?

But this is how we'll be choosing our next president. These are the kinds of political "professionals" who are manipulating the campaign to within 0.00001 millimeters of what the law allows -- and beyond, I guarantee this campaign will produce quite a few federal and state criminal indictments (see last graf of story) -- to smear the election process with excrement. This is what these "professionals" think of voters.

============

The Associated Press (US wire service)
Friday 15 November 2007

NH, Iowa voters
get anti-Romney calls

by Philip Elliott, Associated Press Writer

CONCORD, N.H. -- Residents in New Hampshire and Iowa have received phone calls raising questions about Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney, his Mormon faith and the Vietnam War-era military deferments he received while serving as a missionary in France.
more stories like this

Western Wats, a Utah-based company, placed the calls that initially sound like a poll but then pose questions that cast Romney in a harsh light, according to those who received the calls. In politics, this type of phone surveying is called "push polling" -- contacting potential voters and asking questions intended to plant a message in voters' minds, usually negative, rather than gauging peoples' attitudes.

A spokesman for the company would not comment on whether it made the calls. "Western Wats has never, currently does not, nor will it ever engage in push polling," its client services director, Robert Maccabee, said in a statement released Thursday night.

The 20-minute calls started on Sunday in New Hampshire and Iowa. At least seven people in the two early voting states received the calls.

Among the questions was whether a resident knew that Romney was a Mormon, that he received military deferments when he served as a Mormon missionary in France, that his five sons did not serve in the military, that Romney's faith did not accept blacks as bishops into the 1970s and that Mormons believe the Book of Mormon is superior to the Bible.

"It started out like all the other calls. ... Then all of the sudden it got very unsettling and very negative," said Anne Baker, an independent voter from Hollis, N.H.

"Whatever campaign is engaging in this type of awful religious bigotry as a line of political attack, it is repulsive and, to put it bluntly, un-American," Romney spokesman Matt Rhoades said. "There is no excuse for these attacks. Gov. Romney is campaigning as an optimist who wants to lead the nation. These attacks are just the opposite. It's ugly and divisive."

Sabrina Matteson, a Republican from Epsom, N.H., said she got a call on Wednesday.

"The first 15 or 20 questions were general questions about the leading candidates," she said. "Then he started asking me very, very negatively phrased questions about Romney. The first one was would you have a more favorable, less favorable, blah, blah, blah, impression of Mitt Romney if you knew that his five sons had never served in the military and that he considered working on a presidential campaign as public service or some such question."

In Iowa, Romney supporter and state representative Ralph Watts got a call on Wednesday.

"I was offended by the line of questioning," Watts said. "I would be equally as offended if someone called and said in the nature of if, 'you know the Catholic Church supported pedophile priests.' I don't think it has any place in politics."

Romney's Mormon faith has been an issue in his presidential bid, especially with conservative evangelicals who are central to his strategy to cast himself as the candidate for the GOP's family values voters.

Baker said the caller initially wouldn't tell her who was behind the call. Eventually, Baker was told the caller was from Western Wats.

Last year, Western Wats conducted polling that was intended to spread negative messages about Democratic candidates in a House race in New York and the Senate race in Florida. The Tampa Tribune and the Albany Times Union reported that Western Wats conducted the calls on behalf of the Tarrance Group.

That Virginia-based firm now works for Romney's rival, Rudy Giuliani. The campaign has paid the firm more than $400,000, according to federal campaign reports.

In his statement on behalf of Western Wats, Maccabee said the company was not currently conducting "any work for ... The Tarrance Group, in the state of New Hampshire or Iowa, nor have we for the period in question."

Maccabee added that confidentiality agreements prohibit the company from commenting on specific projects or clients.

Ed Goeas, chief of the Tarrance Group, said there is no connection between the Giuliani campaign and Western Wats. They are using a Houston firm to do their polling.

"I know absolutely it's not us," Goeas said. "I can say with absolute, no, it's not us."

Western Wats also worked for Bob Dole's presidential campaign in 1996. Employees said they used such calls to describe GOP rival Steve Forbes as pro-abortion rights.

New Hampshire law requires [that] all political advertising, including phone calls, identify the candidate being supported. No candidate was identified in the calls.

- 30 -

© Copyright 2007 Associated Press. All rights reserved.