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Lorna Mills and Sally McKay
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"Sirens intended to warn Pickering residents of a safety risk at the nearby nuclear plant are gathering dust in a warehouse after local politicians refused to install them, calling them Cold War "monstrosities" and a threat to property values." Toronto Star Mar. 3, 2004.
Pickering is a suburb with a great big nuclear power plant on the eastern side of Toronto. This has been quite the hilarious hullaballoo. How about those rusty old reactors bringing down property values? Well they're behind the nice burm, you see, no problem. My friend B. Smiley suggests a design for the sirens: elegant curved poles that bend down to the ground so that the siren itself can be aesthetically buried (muffled, if you will) in a pile of sand.
The Star article has dropped offline, but you can read it here, on the riderfans.com forum (for those of you south of the 49th, Canadian football fans can be scary too). This guy David W. cites the story as an example of civilian foolishness. His surreal quote: "And you wonder why the military is falling apart in this country - and will continue to do so? 'cause Canadians talk a good preparedness story but when push comes to shove they only think of themselves."
Now that Arnie has been in office for long enough that the horror has worn off, I recently felt capable of somewhat enjoying Terminator 3. My friends and I laughed pretty hard during the big car chase scene, when the terminatrix is in a giant utility truck, swinging Arnold around on the end of a hook. Things get boring, however, as the show goes on. The dialogue is mostly lame recycled jokes and the acting is middling to poor. They really drag out the plot and I must confess that humanoid-shaped cyborgs just ain't where its at right now. I'm no expert, but I think they are testing out nanotech on scarier stuff than melty chrome. Here's my (least) favourite part, the impactful, overserious voice-over narration at the end: "I finally realised that my destiny all along was not to stop the planet from nuclear destruction, but to survive it." Niiiice. Him and his pretty future wife with their future kids swimming around in their gonads, all locked up together nice and safe in an empty presidential bunker. Time to go check on my trip-wire mine field, barbed-wire fence, and stockpiles of bottled water, plastic sheets and duct tape.
Populist mathematician John Mighton (who wrote a book called The Myth of Ability) on Wittgenstein:
Wittgenstein initially believed that philosophy, like mathematics, could be reduced to logic. He felt that everyday language was too vague for philosophy. He inspired other philosophers to create artificial languages so you could talk about things precisely. From an old profile in Saturday Night Magazine
Laparoscopic surgeon and writer of odd-ball, award winning books, Leonard Shlain on the alphabet:
When beaded together on a horizontal line in a particular sequence these symbols became a decipherable code and made commonplace the ability to record and transfer information with relative ease.
An ideogram or hieroglyph is basically a picture that may contain multiple concepts all superimposed upon one another. The alphabet, on the other hand, strings out these concepts so that they become words in a sentence whose meaning depends on their linear sequence. Untangling the multiple ideas coiled within an ideographic image and converting them to linear code reinforces the belief that one thing follows another, and thus ever so surreptitiously alphabets impose causality upon the thinking process of those who use them. From Shlain's awkward, interesting book, Art and Physics
The Cultural Gutter by Guy Leshinski, Jim Munroe, and James Schellenberg is new, blogstyle and fun. Here's a good quote about computer games (and tap water) by JM:
"In the move from the arcade to the basement, we've lost more than bragging rights. The seedy-cool image of hanging out at the arcade -- which perhaps jump-started the gaming industry -- was traded in for a bland suburban model. Like a lot of shifts from the public to the private, the convenience and control we've gained is at the expense of certain intangibles. While hardly as ominous or significant a trend as bottled water undermining our public water system, these social shifts are both largely instigated by marketing pushes."
Touching the Void (SPOILERS): This is a documentary about mountain climbers Joe Simpson and Simon Yates. Lot's of things go wrong, and at one point Simon is forced to cut the rope, dropping the dangling Joe off the edge of a cliff. The big question of the movie: why does this guy stay alive? My favourite part is when the rope has been cut, and Simpson has fallen partway into the crevasse. He is sitting at the top of an open, gaping, black void. Rather than spend the next 4 days sitting there slowly dying, he decides to lower himself into the blackness. How great is that!? Down he goes, and sure enough there is a way out once he gets to the bottom. It's much too symbolically tidy to actually be a true story! Which brings me to the other thing I liked about the film...its very well crafted narrative. The re-enactments by the actor/climbers were sewn in tightly with the voice-over of the real climbers - there was no duplication of information, and a seamless emotional tone. I became aware of the fact that this story has been told many many times. The guys themselves must be constructing it in their memories, and the book, the lecture circuit, the film, all help to mold into its current, iconic shape.
Kevin Macdonald made the movie. As it went on, it became more mannered. Normally I'd be uncomfortable with that (as with Erroll Morris and his slo-mo coffee cups) but in this case it worked out just fine. I loved the final scenes where Simpson is losing his mind and can't get Boney M out of his head. The film and audio became fragmented, broken and chaotic and it was great. Another powerful visual moment was the closeup of his mouth sucking water from the rock. Sex, death, human in an environment where he does not belong. Sucking up a small muddly water puddle like he was going down on pussy.
One night towards the end he is lying on his back staring up at the stars. He begins to feel as if he has been there for millenia, as if he is part of the rock.
You could tell instantly from their faces which guy (Simon Yates) had cut the rope (and never forgiven himself), and which (Joe Simpson) had miraculously survived (and forgiven his friend for cutting the rope). Simon had darkness in his face and Joe had light (too perky by half).