Every once in a while I think back to my childhood to examine what went wrong. I tend to flip to the obvious subjects, but just recently I’ve come to terms with the fact that what went wrong was TV.
Now in comparison with today, TV didn’t make you as numb. TV was like my dysfunctional brother although he was always there when I needed company. I think I had a TV in my room from when I was a toddler.
In surveying some of the creepiest kids’ shows from the 70s and 80s, I’ve noticed the blatant influence of mind altering drugs, which go beyond a Marty Seals and Kroft type of west coast post smoking ouveure such as Sigmund and the Sea Monsters.
Or Far Out Space Nuts. Nuff Said. “I said Lunch not Launch!” I think I saw this intro a thousand times.
Maybe it was when cocaine became an issue. Of course the road to hell is paved with best intentions even if you are on drugs.
Sifting through punk rock in the mid to late 1980’s is like listening to a desperate last scream against growing old itself. With that, it is also the final shout before the nonconformist was invariably sold out by Moloch-marketing.
It’s about before the internet. It’s about before MTV programmed popular music. It’s just before culture “became the marketing”.
The majority of these recordings were found on an old tape called “All You Kids Do is Destroy” which replicated itself around upstate New York’s college campuses in the 1990’s. Not much is known about who made the tape, except that they gave 150 percent and required nothing in return.
Alamogordo is believed to hail from Madison NJ, in 1984 or 1986. Alamogordo also happens to be a town in New Mexico near where the first atom bomb was detonated. It seems to be an amalgamation of various people who stopped by the basement of someone documented on the tape as “Johnny Spitfire”, who functioned as the guitarist as well as house producer. It is true NJ Basement Punk Rock in the finest sense. Continue reading →
I recently found myself on Coney Island, where the Albert family sold off Astroland to Thor industries who plan to develop a 1.5 Billion dollar all year round resort. We’ll see what how the new economy affects this now. I wonder if it will just sit there vacant for years.
When I got there I couldn’t help noticing a deafening sound emanating from wind blowing through the observation tower. It sounded like the ghosts of a thousand summers. Click here for the mysterious sound. I guess the road to Dante’s Inferno is paved with good intentions. There is something ultra sad and silent about a defunct amusement park in the winter.
Astroland operated from 1955 to last year. I’ve always found its dirtiness and grunge to define Coney in its way. You’ll notice that they took the carriages off the Wonder Wheel for good. There is something naked about it now. It’s just a wheel. Both the Wonder Wheel and the Cyclone are supposedly going to be preserved with The Shoot the Freak lot I’d imagine. It was disturbing to see a for lease sign on Ruby’s Old Tyme Bar and Grill on the boardwalk. Although I heard it closed on Memorial day weekend when some guy fell ten feet through the bathroom floor into some kind of rat den. Where or where will all those denizens go? All the pictures on the walls? Such good times. Such character you can’t buy. Continue reading →
A few years ago after reading about the Mayan 2012 factor and traveling to the Yucatan, I came up with this animation to try and understand and visualize the Mayan Calendar from hundreds of years ago. Each frame represents one day.
Right click on a PC or (Use the CTRL key on a Mac) to zoom into the diagram for greater detail. Rollover the discs to see the cycles.
One of the most curious things is how the Mayans perceived time in cycles, which in some cases interlocked. For instance one 260 day cycle, called a Tzolkin, synchronized with a Solar year every 52 years. One Tzolkin was also equivalent to nine months, or the gestation period of a human being. Continue reading →
Just dug this up. I started getting the sircam virus in my email way back in 2001. For people who do not know the mechanisms of the virus look here. It would copy information from the “my documents” folder on any Windows 98 os machine, and send it randomly to people within that person’s outlook address book. It would mask the file, with a corrupted name, and include this message. (Hi! How are you? This is the file with the information that you ask for See you later. Thanks).
When I pulled the corrupt document down on a mac to examine it, (Never try and do this on a PC running Windows) changed the extension to a .doc, and opened in MS Word as a unformatted text file I got the following messages within hundreds of pages of noise.
There is absolutely no pattern as these messages were sent without the owner’s knowledge and were organized and distributed by a unthinking virus. I started enjoying the complete randomness of the messages after a while. I have excerpted them, and do not know any of the owners.
1. This fragment appeared to be some kind of document about dentistry in Spanish. It was translated (loosely) by babelfish from Spanish.
ERUPTION. – It is the movement from the weaves that surround it until the buccal cavity, is vertical, begins within the bone to maxilar. It initiates – when already the crown of the tooth has formed, when it has matured the enamel and when formaciÛn of raÌz begins. It is classified: – preclÌnica ErupciÛn: it is the heave of the tooth within the bone to maxilar. – clÌnica ErupciÛn: it is the heave of the tooth in the buccal cavity. The speed of the heave depends on the resistance of the weaves that surround to the tooth, when clÌnica phase arrives at wing, no longer is it and its movement is but r·pido and returns to be slow when there is contact with the antagonist. Active ErupciÛn: heave in the clÌnica phase and does not finish when it finds the antagonist. Within the preclÌnica phase there is a heave within the bone to maxilar towards the buccal cavity, this movement finds resistance in the weaves that surround the tooth. In the clÌnica phase there is another heave that receives the name of erupciÛn activates Èste movement initiates since part of the tooth in the buccal cavity is seen until it finds his antagonistic
2. Cannot figure out what language this is. Turkish perhaps. It appears to be about photography.
B a g i a n F o t o – F o t o i l u s t r a s i y a n g t u r u n k e B a g . D e s a i n d i h a r a p k a n f o t o f i n a l y a n g s u d a h d i s e p a k a t i d e n g a n R e d p e l s e t i a p r u b r i k . S e h i n g g a t i d a k a d a p e r u b a h a n – p e r u b a h a n d i t e n g a h j a l a n . – F o t o s u a s a n a u n t u k i s i r u b r i k h e n d a k n y a b e r i m a g e s i z e m i n i m a l b e r u k u r a n 1 4 X 1 0 c m d e n g a n r e s o l u s i m i n i m a l 1 5 0 . U n t u k f o t o l e a d F O R U T , W a w a n c a r a , F O K U S , P r o f i l , h e n d a k n y a l e b i h b e s a r d a r i u k u r a n t e r s e b u t ( k i r a – k i r a m i n i m a l s e l e b a r 2 2 c m d e n g a n r e s o l u s i 2 0 0 ) . U n t u k k o l o m a t a u l o g o d a p a t m e n y e s u a i k a n ( b i s a b e r d i s k u s i t e r l e b i h d a h u l u a t a u k i r a – k i r a m i n i m a l l e b a r 5 c m d e n g a n r e s o l u s i m i n i m a l 1 5 0 ) . – F o t o u n t u k C o v e r b e r i m a g e s i z e m i n i m a l l e b a r 2 2 c m d e n g a n r e s o l u s i s e k i t a r 3 0 0 .
Upon my arrival last year in December for a vacation from the northeast, I rented a cheap Diahatsu car for a hundred dollars for a week and started to drive across the island. There is one main road which encircles both the French and Dutch sides. There are hardly any traffic lights, and the cities become extremely congested during rush hours. As I got out of the Simpson Bay area by the airport the car’s main brakes began to get softer and softer on the hills.
The island is very curious and unique in that it’s divided in two with a more developed Dutch side and a more rural French side. There are casinos and Ocean liners on the Dutch side while there is hardly a bank machine, except in Marigot on the French side.
As I continued to drive it had become dark and I was lost, I came down upon a hairpin turn on Chamba Hill above the French Quarter by the Fish Pond and suddenly realized there was no brake fluid left in the car and no way to stop. At the last moment I managed to turn into a dirt driveway and back up the hill. There was a parking lot there next to an old plantation house with blue shutters which was a small restaurant. The owner of the restaurant came out on the porch and I explained what happened and asked if I could use the phone to call the rental company. The owner was an friendly man named Tony who had a gracious smile which immediately calmed me down. It seemed as though he ran the place and lived in the back of the house. There was one American couple eating on the porch. Tony gave me his phone and explained that there we was a separate country code to call the other side of the island. I called the number on my contract and they told me it would take about ninety minutes to send over a replacement car because of all the nighttime traffic near the airport. Continue reading →
On Interstate 15 from Barstow to Las Vegas in the Mojave Desert is an Archeological work in progress. After driving a few miles up a dirt road and going through the exit of the Camp I found myself at the foot of a trial. This part of the Mojave was once called Lake Mannix but is now so alkaline and dry, that absolutely nothing could possibly live here. The site is so inhospitable that they can only dig in the winter months. What they have found here are what people believe to be the earliest evidence of tool creation in North America. They find these tools six feet under the rocks and sand. Many of the pits that are being dug are covered because of the heat. They are dug in three foot cubes or matrices.
