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The Public Blogging of Pomosexuality, Homotextuality, Homophobiaphilia, and Drear Theory (aka Career Theory) [aka Gay4Pay]. We also read the Corner and OpJournal so the right buttock will be punished as well.
All comments subject to publication. Or dismissal. Or Both.
Boing Boing clues us in to the terrific illustrator Boris Artzybasheff. Boris A. was a something of a deco surrealist. At other times he was just something else. A white Russian émigré to New York, he achieved his greatest notoriety in the 40's and 50's doing covers for Time Magazine. Which means his years there coincided with Whittaker Chambers'. Time must have been a more interesting place during that era than is generally acknowledged. As this cover would also seem to indicate.
Pop Present
1. The new Pink video for her song from the Charlie's Angels soundtrack is frenetic and a little cool but, in a stunning pop culture development, it's really the song itself that got my attention. I pretty much zoned out on the vid because the song was so surprising. Though I did notice that Pink is looking very hot in a chunkie punkie kinda way. So stupid of Madonna not to work with William Orbit again. He's given a "featuring William Orbit" credit on the Pink song. The time shifting beats, bleeps, gurgles and fuzz could have been Madge's, but she had to work with that French dude again. The Mad one's CD has been mine for the listening since the day it came out, thanks to the roommate, but I'm filled with lassitude whenever I espy it. I can't find the strength even to pick it up and check out the song titles. I think the house DJ only listened to it once himself.
2. I dislike Busta Rhymes speed rap almost as much as dislike speed metal, speed prog, speed opera and speed bluegrass. I just don't care how fast anyone can sing, rap or play something, virtuosos--and yeah I know that's not the plural, in ITALIAN--always leave me cold. But Busta's been in some good videos. There are several memorable images in the video for his Put Your Hands Where My Eyes Could See (the chick with the airy headdress that fills the screen especially caught my eye), but the best moment has too be him strutting down the hallway with the elephant. So funny. The looks on both their faces. I want to see it again right now. A tip of the fabulous airy headdress to Hype Williams, the vid's auteur.
3. I feel so much happier now that I've stopped using CNN, Foxnews, and MSNBC as my background sight and sound. The war sucked me in for a couple months, but I've switched now to Univision and Gala as my most constant TV friends. The teen dance contest shows, the sauna pants commercials, the kitchen sink variety hours, and the scenery chewing soap operas are such good company. So, So, SO much nicer to look up at the screen and see two totally cute, Speedoed dudes doing an aquatic gymnastic routine on a pole rising from a pool in Acapulco, than to look up into Aaron Brown's Beagle eyes. The eyes that connect to his Chihuahua brain. The brain that houses his Irish Wolf Hound self-regard.
THIS JUST IN… [Kathryn Jean Lopez ]
…Dick Gephardt to lose the social conservative vote. His gay daughter to be profiled in People.
Hmmmmm, let's see. The Vice-President hired his gay daughter as "aide-de-camp" (wink) during the 2000 campaign. And the president's kids might soon be shopping a record deal as the Doobie Sisters. I gotta think news of these things reaches the social conservatives, too.
Of course the so-cons' powers of denial are formidable in these areas, so it might be true that images of Gephardt's lesbian daughter will stick to their brains more permanently than do the memories of Mary Cheney on the campaign payroll.
I have a feeling that Mary Cheney and her girlfriend could re-enact a Tijuana bachelor party on K-Lo' s kitchen table and Katherine Jean would still be haunted more by Chrissy Gephardt's People Magazine, uhm, spread.
I love the Jayson Blair story (though I was hoping Jayson was gay, since I always like one final twist and I especially like the final twist to be that one--the Polish girlfriend is making that less likely, though not impossible). And I love Seth Mnookin's Willy Wonka name. Seth, you should know, has been covering the story for Newsweek. And Y'all know how much I love the vernacular. Still I find it strange that twice in the Newsweek cover story he wrote about Blair, Seth uses the slangy and somewhat dated expression, "went down" (as in happened, NOT as in its more interesting and never dated meaning).
As here:
His world was shrinking—down to a dwindling number of longtime friends; his girlfriend, a former Times clerk who had taken a leave the day after Blair resigned, and the opportunists crawling all over a journalistic scandal that was dominating talk radio, cable news channels and Internet chat rooms. He was following his own story, and phoned friends after the meeting for a fill on what went down.
And here:
He went so far as to tell Jim Roberts, the Times’s national editor, that he wanted off the story, several of Blair’s friends told NEWSWEEK. Roberts says that’s not how the conversation went down, and it’s important to stress that trying to pinpoint reality when dealing with Blair is like trying to grab a fistful of running water.
The second use here might conceivably be an unacknowledged direct quote from Mr Roberts, but then that leads to the question of why the highly specific metaphor Seth seems to attribute to Roberts isn't in quotes either. In either case an odd bit of writing and editing. The earlier "went down" would appear to be wholly Seth's own. All I can say is the first "went down" made me tilt my head like a dog hearing weird noises in the backyard and the second one made me laugh out loud. I was praying for a trifecta. You'd think that writers and editors would be careful not to introduce any literary innovations into this particular story, especially Iceberg Slimisms . You'd be wrong, motherfucker, it didn't go down like that!
Was Seth just trying to be street? And if he was, why did he pick a street struck in time? Maybe the Robert Blake murder case would be a better fit for Seth's talents. You can be sure Baretta's gonna give us a few dozen "went downs" before he goes up.
If you've been running the FightAIDS@home program that uses your spare computer cycles to help design anti-HIV drugs you need to uninstall the current program and install the new version. Instructions for the uninstall of the old and installation the new program are available here. If you haven't been running the app before, now is a good time to start, you lazyphuk. The email I got announcing the new program also described the new management of the project. It had originally been a commercial/academic partnership but it will now be managed solely by the academic half, the Olson Lab at the Scripps Research Institute. The email also contained that essential word of new economy public relations euphemism, TRANSITIONING:
FightAIDSatHome is a computational research project partnership between Entropia and the Olson laboratory at The Scripps Research Institute. FAAH accelerates AIDS research by generating and testing candidate drug compounds against detailed models of evolving AIDS viruses. Dr. Arthur Olson, Director of the Molecular Graphics Laboratory at TSRI, is the FAAH project leader. With the shift from Phase I to Phase II, the program will become entirely self-managed. As part of that process, Entropia is transitioning the project over to the Olson Laboratories at TSRI, where it will become a wholly non-profit endeavor.
That's what I want my tombstone to read: TRANSITIONING. The glorious word etched in marble below the benign figure of an eyes-downcast, angel-winged Ari Fleischer, or some other master of bureaucratic poetics.
Here's one result from the work so far:
The project has ably demonstrated that with such massive computational abilities, researchers can utilize intensive approaches to identify drug candidates that succumb to resistance mutations and those that are more resilient to such mutations. An early lead developed during Phase I, TL-3, Has been shown to be promising against the drug resistant strains that have arisen from the currently approved HIV Protease inhibitors. The characteristics of TL-3 have been born out by the FAAH computational work.
And here's some some statistics porn with all the sexy facts and figures from the project to date:
Over the course of the FAAH project, nearly 60,000 machines in 20 countries have been involved in the project, logging just shy of 1,400 years of continuous computing and performing over nine million tasks. These contributed resources effectively functioned as a computer with 14 terabytes of memory and 1,335 terabytes of disk space. Peak power for this virtual supercomputer was 31 trillion calculations per second.
And that's what I'm going to start putting on all forms requesting my age: just shy of 1,400 years.
Guest blogger Albert Camus checking in (which explains the cigarette ashes on the keyboard):
The lands that shelter beauty are the hardest to defend--so eager are people to spare them. Thus artistic nations ought to be the natural victims of barren nations--if the love of freedom did not outweigh the love of beauty in men's hearts. That is an instinctive wisdom, freedom being the source of beauty.
But what explains the cigarette ashes in my heart?
Where are the cigarette ashes of yesteryear?
I've improved enough poetry, so back to Albert C. This is the Agenda Bender final. Defend the statement above as true, and then attack the statement as wrongheaded. Next, formulate an improved version of the insights contained therein in no more words than Albert used. Then grade yourself honestly. Send your grade in and we will note it on your record. Finally remit your tuition for the semester just concluded to the bursar at the email address at the top left of this page.
Optional extra credit exercise: Win a Nobel Prize for literature and then die in a car crash three years later.
Looking at all the smokey Camus pics that google coughed up has me thinking about New York City's accidental mayor. While pondering that creature my mind coughed this up: second hand smug.
Orthography update: Spellcheck and dictionary.com both inform me that I've spelled smokey incorrectly. They claim it is correctly spelled smoky, which looks Russian or something to me. Smokey with an e is Mr Bears first name. And henceforth it is the adjective as well. Microsoft and dictionary.com, please take note.
12:47 PM
