February 13, 2009 - Coffee Break - Kansas City Missouri

I checked the weather on the Internet. It had been lightly raining – or at least drizzling. 38° and light show. I don’t believe it but then the glass doors are all fogged up and I can't see out. Someone enters and I see big fluffy flakes falling out there. Yes it is snowing and I had to lean from the Internet.  I come across a new term in the news: retention awsrds and I wondering is this the euphanism for an “executive bonuse?” Yes and no but beware.

Yet how difficult it is, once words have been betrayed, to take them seriously again – Susan Sontag

It is an honorable term when applied to military re-enlistment bonuses but when used as a tool to tunnel funds from already looted assets, well we begin to question even its legitimate usage. A simple apology is no longer sufficient. No indeedy doo, it is not!

In the middle of it – everyone is introducing themselves – it comes to me, but I have my face in my computer and refuse – and the State Senator whose constituent meeting this is – they have convened themselves around me – says – we apologize to those already here (in the Coffee Break) – and it was a statement that only applied to me – and she was really not rally sorry (meaning my presence was unfortunate but I had a choice and could leave – to apologize as a formality, a curiosity) - and we (the grand royal “WE”) welcome you to join in – which I had no intention doing, but listening would be ok as I continued my private project – she proceeded to give her legislative summary (what had happened in Jeff City since the had met a week ago) – "Dream" has passed of course – and she explained how she was trying to hold the regulatory line at the PUC – this is no time for gutting regulation to meet the financing needs for a nuclear plant that will probably never be built anyway – and the argument put forward was the number of construction jobs it would create – too risky for private financing – economic stimulation is the corporate mantra – how quickly everyone learns the language that will get the results they want – tis the way of politics – and then the meeting beaks up and everyone presses forward to introduce themselves, and have a few private words if only to say hello. She presses the flesh. A political wanker has cornered her. Well guys, I have to go. I’ve got a meeting at a homeless shelter.

It is as if
Reality is
What money
Invents
No, it really is

 She might fib a little to get out of a scrape, but she was thoroughly ashamed of herself afterwards. Perhaps she even took a perverse pleasure in her little lies because they made her feel how really bad she was… but she usually indulged herself only when she hoped to be able to turn the falsehood, secretly and quickly into a truth – Robert Musil]


In the end you find out
That you have painted yourself
Into the corner
You are trapped inside
What you’ve made of your life
Would it have been any better
To have made nothing of yourself
To devote your life implies
Something socially desirable
And not everyone is so good
And everyone dies
Both the good and the bad

 She’s the kindest soul in the world, in things she’s indifferent about – Dorthy L Sayers

February 9, 2009 - Coffee Break - Kansas City Missouri

59° Cloudy with wind out of the south at 6mph and a humidty of 52%

John Adams is the Care Bear of the American avant-garde – David Hagdu

The weather has changed - it's really coming down. Good thing I rolled up my windows when I got out. Better check the Weater Underground. It was sprinkling earlier but this is unexpected. There was even the reminents of a rainbow to the north (about 10 degrees worth - not even what could be described as an arc). And it pours in big spring guggles. Bubbling and puddeling.

Kansas City is in the midst of a rain - the radar shows it extending from the Iowa border to Arkansas. Yes, heavy rain today - humidity 72%, dew point 48, wind calm, visibility 1.2 miles. And now it has let up. Dribble, dribble, dribble.

The transference bird of little mind has risen high / by its wings of coincidence – James Tate

Little Doggie


An advantage
Consumer attitude
Get on with it
Move on
-
From one
To the other
Get on with it
Move on
-
One after
Another
On with
The progression
-
Of it
Moving on
Advancing
Up the chain
-
Onward and up
Move on
Get on
Go along
-
Whatever happens in a black hole stays in a black hole – Pankaj Joshi



Factoids:

$500m of venture funds were invested in virtual worlds in 2007

The videogame industry will top $57b this year

Online gaming topped $7b last year

Two-thirds of the 18-34 year old population play video games

The Average age of a videogamer is 35

Libraries claim that video games increase readership

I just got back from a talk by Brody Condon at the Kansas City Art Institute. The appropiation of commodities for one's own use well sort of. Culture as a found object - maybe.


Revisiting the 1993 Waco, Texas episode, gamers enter the mind and form of
a “resurrected” David Koresh through a specially designed voice activated, surround sound enabled, hard plastic 3D skin. In an attempt to defend the Branch Davidian compound against internal intrigue, skeptical civilians, rival theologians and the inexorable advance of government agents, each player on the network plays as a ”Koresh”. Ensnared in the custom "Koresh skin", players are bombarded with sounds of government psy-ops, internal voices and the clamor of battle, and empowered to voice messianic texts from Koresh's exegesis of the book of revelation, wield a variety of weapons from the Mount Carmel cache and influence the behavior of both followers and opponents by “radiating” charisma. Waco Resurrection draws on the rhetoric of conspiracy theory, cult activity and apocalypticism to investigate the Waco siege as a cultural milestone

February 7, 2009 - The Plaza Branch Library - 4801 Main St - Kansas City Missouri

Back in Kansas City again and already I'm itching to be traveling again. I said adieus to Iggy and left. Wrigley had hopped into the car and curled up the night before. She was already at the lake with her buddy Colby (or maybe it was Kobe - dogs and cats and even gerbils are named by people who don't know nor care to know their real names are - these names that we give them are merely place holders. I once name my cats - Cat One and Cat Two and was always forgetting which was one was One and which one was Two - the vet has horrified that they did not have proper names. They know who they are, I explained but it did not satisfy these self-styled animal lovers).

Only Iggy remains now in the house. And when they return from the lake Iggy will demand attention - meow, meow, meow (Cats need two hours of social interaction a day and Iggy will have a deficit of six hours by then) - and Jerry will hollower at Iggy and Iggy will get neurotic and Jerry pissed and Iggy will eat the green foliage of the flowers and vomit on the carpet. And so on it will go. But I am gone. It is wonderful to walk out in the morning without a coat and to roll down the window of the car.

He who has the final answers can no longer speak to the other, breaking off genuine communication for the sake of what he believes in – Karl Jaspers

When that snow melts someone is going to have to spend a lot of time out there [right in front of the Caribou] cleaning off that plethora of cigarette butts

I think it is January. January
         It is
Another day this day, today
        A January day
The sun rises as it does in the
        Morning today
This is the morning that the sun
        Is rising
The January morning of
        This day
Today, today – to market
         We go
This little piggy crying wee
         All the way

Everything that can be thought at all can be thought clear. Everything that can be said at all can said clearly. But not everything that can be thought can be said – Ludwig Wittgenstein

FACTOIDS:

· In 2007 Americans spent $58b on diet foods, weight loss and fitness programs.
· People on average consume 28% more calories when eating snacks labeled ‘low fat’ than they do than when they eat snacks not so labeled
· Food production accounts for 17% of the fossil fuel used in the US
· The average American over consumes or wastes 80% more food than is needed for a healthy diet

· 28% of the average daily calories are consumed in the form of liquids

· Actively obese people are almost 50% less likely to die of heart disease than sedentary thin people

February 6, 2009 - Caribou, Homewood Illinois

Back to Kansas City today, my backpack is by the door, my coat is slung over the back of a chair, my knit cap and my gloves are on the table. I'm ready to roll as soon as I pack up this computer.

And it is being recommended that to keep your job in this time of recession that you whiten your teeth, that you be first to volunteer – then learn to be a better brown noser (if you have to learn it may already be too late) – but they did not recommend that you work smarter, do a better job, be more proficient – only that you not whine and work overtime and kiss the biggest ass around.

Efficient, hardworking people have no convictions beyond the limits of their own narrow specialties; none, that is, they will not instantly abandon under pressure from the outside – Musil

The Magic salve
Relieving the night’s
Mutilations and death
Is an act
of bad faith

A reader cannot help
But be caught up short
Most pornography has
Its fair share of bad faith

BTW – I’m under 30. I’ve also notice that the people who wear them [protective footware] are generally better-dressed

The end results only reflects its work when that effort is not in evident

Consistency is the hobgoblin of a small mind. Subtly is the hallmark of genius

And the snow comes down
And Mr. Sinatra sings
- Just say the words
Let’s fly away come

With me – fly away

February 5, 2009 - The Caribou - Homewood Illinois

Twelve degrees this morning with a wind out of the south at 4mph. The humidity is 65%. The high today is expected to be 29°. Ila dropped me off again at the Bou on her way again to work stocking Hallmark cards at Wallgreens. Iggy was running around as if he had hit the catnip again. Iggy are Wriggly were playing together, a highly unusual circumstance – running is circles through the dining room, the living room, the kitchen and back into the dining area where we sit. Jerry does not like cats and the cat is too dumb to stay out of his way and picks the most inopportune moment to jump up on the counter. It’s Joe’s cat or it would have been booted out the door. What we will put up with for the sake of the kids even if they have grown up and left home for good.

That the universe is a totality does not deter useful concepts from being constructed using a totalizing universal metaphor

Our pre-immense: we live in an age of comparison, we can verify as has never been verified before [therefore] we enjoy differently, we suffer differently, our instinctive activity is to compare an unheard number of things – Friedrich Nietzsche

The Goloshes of Fortune
by
Hans Christian Andersen
(1838)

I must tell you,” said she [Fortune], “that to-day is my birthday; and in honor of it I have been intrusted with a pair of goloshes, to introduce amongst mankind. These goloshes have the property of making every one who puts them on imagine himself in any place he wishes, or that he exists at any period. Every wish is fulfilled at the moment it is expressed, so that for once mankind have the chance of being happy.”

“No,” replied Care; “you may depend upon it that whoever puts on those goloshes will be very unhappy, and bless the moment in which he can get rid of them.”

“What are you thinking of?” replied the other. “Now see; I will place them by the door; some one will take them instead of his own, and he will be the happy man.”

This was the end of their conversation.
Being against what someone else is for is a form of acquiescence as it lets the other control the agenda

At this moment he wished he were a man without qualities. But it is probably not so very much different for anyone. Few people in mid-life really know how they got to be what they are…, but they have the feeling that from this point on nothing much can change – Robert Musil

Silence is not the absence of sound
But the absence of significance
And all things meaning everything
Is a form of quietude

In the beginning there was nothing
And in the end there was silence

Factoids:
·12% of American women and 34% of men do not wash their hands after using public restrooms
·Fewer than 50% of health care workers regularly wash their hands while on the job
·A sampling of New York doctors’ ties found staph bacteria on a third of them

February 4, 2009 - The Caribou, Homewood Illinois

Clear with a temperature of 24 degrees. The wind is out of the north at 5mph. The humidity is 52%

Another fat asshole proclaiming ‘Communism doesn’t work’ – what he is actually speaking of is democracy and boasting that our system works best. What he is unaware of as he parrots what he has been told is that ‘Communism’ has never existed.- Marx was never a Marxist – Stalin proclaimed socialism by fiat, much as Bush proclaimed himself a war president – and whether Russia was even on the “road to socialism’ is highly contested. What should be proclaimed is that Capitalist democracy doesn’t work and that it’s the only one we have tried. What we have managed to prove is that money will always trump intelligence. And cognitive science is rapidly demonstrating that the ‘rational individual’ is an absolute fiction. The free market economy has always been a much more radical idea than even the most rabid socialist rant.


We can’t do that! If the war ended, what would happen to our movement? – Jerry Rubin

And just then someone else is proclaiming that he got there and immediately won one hundred and thirty dollars on the slots. It’s all luck he says and he managed to walk away from the table with three-hundred and twenty bucks. Just as planting trees on the prairies brought the rain – there is no reason everyone should not be a winner also (maybe? Except that the casinos would go bankrupt and the Indians go back on the dole).

O when all is lost, / When we have thrown our shoes in the sea, / When our watches have crawled off into weeds, / Our typewriters have finally spelled perhaps, accidentally the unthinkable word – James Tate

What keeps one from going too far
Keeps one satisfied with how far
One has already gone

It would be easy to say what this idea consisted of, but no one could possibly describe its significance. For what distinguishes a great, stirring idea from an ordinary and mistaken one, is that it exists in a kind of molten state through which the self enters an infinite expanse, and inversely, the expanse of the universe enters the self and so it becomes impossible to differentiate between what belongs to the self and what belongs to the infinite – Robetrt Musil

The more we spend
The more we save
If we gauged our health
The way we do the economy
Then cancer would be a blessing
Yes stupid, it is for sale
Everything in the store
Is on sale

We tend to think about systems in terms of our personal motivations. But systems have their own logic. A market system may be driven by individuals or corporations seeking profits, but the primary function of the market itself is to grow. That is why growth, not profit, is the conventional measure of economic health – Luke Mitchell

February 3, 2009 - Caribou - Homewood Illlinois

I rode the snowmobile around the lake. Wrapped up in a cacoon smelling the gasoline fumes - the roar of the motor. I like the silence (except for the sizzle of a clump of snow falling from a fir) of cross country skiing on a unbroken trail

The North American greeting cards industy is a $7.5b business - 50% special occasions and 50% everyday. Birthday cards are the most common type of card sold, ccomprising a third of the sales. 80% of Americans purchase a card during the year. 93% of the cards sold are purchased by women between the ages of 25 and 43. Hallmark is the industry leader with 58.4% of the market. American Greetings is second with a 26.9% market share.

Half of the purchasers of cards believe that a greeting card is an important way to share and communicate their feelings. The other half purchaces cards because they feel that it is expected of them.

Overshoes are often used in heavy rain
Overshoes are an article of rubber footware
Overshoes are use where snow is frequent
Overshoes are worn over regular shoes
Overshoes are articles of protection
Overshoes are commonly know as galoshes
Overshoes are waterproof
Overshoes are made of durable and thick rubber
Overshoes are not as thick as tires
Overshoes are not intended to be inflated
The rubber of overshoes insulate the foot from the cold
Overshoes have a hole to fit the foot into
They fit onto the shoe as a sock fits the foot
They are often made of black rubber and simply designed
They are rarely laced
Another type other than the four buckle arctic
Is the Wellington boot which come up to just below the knee
Overshoes are considered gouache
Yellow cement boots are Wellingtons to
Cement boots waterlog a body
These boots are really gouache
One wouldn’t be caught dead in them

Back to Homewood. Got my train reservation for Kansas City - leaving on Friday

Local knowldege
Not entirely uselss
To the larger world

Out of context
Office politics
Is a unit of measurment




Everyone must measure up
But to get ahead ignore
Any expert advice

Sucess is a singularity
Celebrities are exceptions
Litigation issues raise one's
Visibility

The tendency to overly mimic the emotional expressions of others is an important component of successful social interactions - Marco Iacoboni