Showing posts with label sci-fi. Show all posts
Showing posts with label sci-fi. Show all posts

Miribilia Report

Wednesday, February 29, 2012

(Mirabilia - n. events that inspire wonder, marvelous phenomena, small miracles, beguiling ephemera, inexplicable joys, changes that inspire quiet awe, eccentric enchantments, unplanned jubilations, sudden deliverance from boring evils; from the Latin mirabilia, "marvels.")

* The National Center for Atmospheric Research reports that the average cloud is the same weight as 100 elephants.

* Anthropologists say that in every culture in history, children have played the game hide and seek.

* With every dawn, when first light penetrates the sea, many seahorse colonies perform a dance to the sun.

* A seven-year-old Minnesota boy received patent number 6,368,227 for a new method of swinging on a swing.

* To make a pound of honey, bees have to gather nectar from about two million flowers. To produce a single pound of the spice saffron, humans have to handpick and process 80,000 flowers. In delivering the single survivor necessary to fertilize an ovum, a man releases 500 million sperm.

* Kind people are more likely than mean people to yawn when someone near them does.

* There are always so many fragments of spider legs floating in the air that you are constantly inhaling them wherever you go.

* "The average river requires a million years to move a grain of sand 100 miles," says science writer James Trefil.

* Because half of the world's vanilla crop is grown in Madagascar, the whole island smells like vanilla ice cream.

* Your body contains so much iron that you could make a spike out of it, and that spike would be strong enough to hold you up.

* In his book *The Physics of Immortality: Modern Cosmology, God and the Resurrection of the Dead,* physicist Frank J. Tipler offers what he says is scientific proof that every human being who has ever lived will be resurrected from the dead at the end of time.

* In the Ukraine you can buy Fat in Chocolate, a food with a layer of dark chocolate covering a chunk of pork fat.

* Bali has 80,000 temples.

* Romanian physicists created gaseous globes of plasma that grew, reproduced, and communicated with each other, thereby fulfilling the definition for life.

* In an apparent attempt to raise their volume above the prevailing human din, some nightingales in big cities have learned to unleash 95-decibel songs, matching the loudness of a chainsaw.

* There is a statistically significant probability of world-class athletes and military leaders being born when Mars is rising in the sky.

* In the pueblos of New Mexico, bricks still measure 33 by 15 by 10 centimeters, proportions that almost exactly match those of the bricks used to build Egypt's Temple of Hatshepsut 3,500 years ago.

* In hopes of calming flustered lawbreakers, Japanese cops have substituted the sound of church bells for sirens on police cars.

* Scientists believe they'll be able to figure out why cancer cells are virtually immortal, and then apply the secret to keeping normal cells alive much longer, thereby dramatically expanding the human life span.

See - Link for more

As I read each one of these "marvels" it's somewhat like meditating. My shoulders begin to drop. The tenseness falls from my neck and head and I wonder if this could actually help to lower your blood pressure.

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STEAMPUNK

Monday, May 12, 2008

STEAMPUNK

A Retro Design Movement That's All About the Future

Whether you love it or hate it, it's here to be mainstream-ed. The New York Times profiled it last weekend.

Steampunk style clothes and designers have been around for a long time as have authors, performance artists, and musicians (DeVotchKa, Rasputina, Abney Park) around the world. The local Burlesque reviews and caberet shows are appearing in most every town across the country. Some people are over it and think it's silly but I like the return to this bygone era and admire the beauty and creativity.

Kat Bret has a nice photo portfolio and you can see how she pulls from different periods so skillfully. She really captures the clothing and style of that dark, mad max melancholy, steampunk, whateverthefuckyouwannacallit genre. You're welcome. NSFW

"The term "steampunk" is a play on cyberpunk, a type of near-future science fiction where rebellious hackers use handmade tech to wage virtual warfare with corporations and governments. Steampunk was a term used almost jokingly as a name for science fiction that was set in the Victorian era as opposed to the virtual future, but which still featured rebellious protagonists utilizing strange technology. In steampunk, the punk is not a computer hacker, but a mechanical one. I do believe the pendulum has swung."



Abney Park


for more on Steampunk:
Workshop | PaperMag | Wired | Jake von Slatt | Jeff Vandermeer | Datamancer | Treehouse | Flickr | More Flickr | Maker Faire

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FESTIVAL WEAR

Monday, July 23, 2007

FESTIVAL WEAR

"Festival Wear" these days must be an ass kicking money maker. While we were still twisting one up behind the main stage, evidentially someone was planning a whole line of festival wear for us festival lovers. The whole big bonanza superfest scene has become a tad bit crass where once it was almost pure-- in a non-virginal way, but pure of music and with the purest of intent.

Wasn't part of the whole festival concept in the beginning to share, trade, and barter? (I'll trade you my embroidered vest for your pipe) The music and the love was the fucking thing! Everything else was incidental. Extremely low maintenance. I know that clothes weren't very important, if you even wore them at all.

Websites and catalogs are now devoted to festival clothing, hats and other accessories specifically for the festivals and beyond. There's even a Burning Man Clothing Swap August 5. Illuminated clothes are fun. You may see a window display of "wellies" proclaiming "hip festival fashion" for any well respected festival goer. (Thanks, Deborah)

Lotus Moon, who is about as ethical as a company can be, has a trademark on those "Pixie Pockets" and Heretika has some similar pixie belts you may also see at gatherings. I'll cop to getting one for my sweet husband once but it was gifted to me. You can't fault a business for answering the call of what the market wants.

It's always about change. Burning Man is (some would say has been) going corporate. America's biggest counterculture jamboree is also a $10 million business. Now, Business 2.0 reports, it's trying to leverage its brand -- and save the planet -- by (gasp!) inviting corporate participants.

link | via

So, is change good when it's profitable? Does money fuck everything up? Will Lassie find Timmy in the well?

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Still Culture Jamming

Monday, April 16, 2007

Negativland's Mark Hosler (and Asheville area resident) talks about intellectual property, creativity and multimedia art

Viewed by some as artistic outlaws, Negativland are either the merry pranksters of music, or the monkey wrench gang of popular culture.

For almost 30 years, the group has created striking political statements via media collages--initially in the realms of music and live performance, and now also in the area of visual art, video, books and radio--appropriating sounds, imagery and text from other sources. This sometimes got the group into hot water.

Mark Hosler, de facto leader and spokesman for the group, visited Tucson this weekend with his multimedia lecture about Negativland and its activities. "Adventures in Illegal Art: Creative Media Resistance and Negativland," was Friday night, April 13.

As the raw material for its singular art form, Negativland uses information and the ways of disseminating and manipulating information (media), the 45-year-old Hosler says in a telephone interview from his home outside Asheville, NC, where he had shared some of his artwork in February with the locals.

link


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Sunday, January 29, 2006

WEBTRAIL - Top 100, PETA, Ivins, Boomer, Mancuso, Garden of Delights, James Frey

Garden Of Delights is a good vintage vinyl site. One of 7 or 8 good ones I've found lately. Freaky Lady posts mostly rare 60s music. Not as rare in the weird sense as Cake & Polka Parade, which has it's own fun, but informative niche.

‘Love Saves The Day’, an essential new book, which charts the development of New York (and subsequently worldwide) club culture, takes it’s name from a party held on Valentines Day 1970 at the home of David Mancuso, a loft space at 647 Broadway & Bleeker, in NoHo, NYC. (via Autopoiesis & Cognition Conversations)

Please Sign This Petition if you agree that James Frey, Author of "A Million Little Pieces", Random House & Nan Telese,the Publisher of these lies should offer a refund of his book considering the controversy surrounding it.

Were you born between 1946 and 1964? Boomer Baby is asking you to send in your childhood toy memories. I enjoyed the "Easy Bake Oven" because YUM!, those little cakes that you baked by a lightbulb were seriously good eating. I also liked paper dolls. Betsy McCall came in a magazine each month with different outfits to cut out and put on. Try getting a small child today to get interested in paper dolls. Not going to happen. (via mousemusings)

Molly Ivins, 61, is again battling breast cancer. [More »] (via labkat)

China's Shocking Cat and Dog Fur Trade - Trent Reznor slams killing of cats and dogs for fur in shocking new PETA video.

2006 Q Magazine Readers' 100 Greatest Albums Ever. These lists are always subjective but always interesting.

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Saturday, March 12, 2005

What Half the World Wants - by Mumia Abu Jamal

If we look to the ubiquitous commercials that zip past our eyeballs, we would think that most women want the bun-roller or a new and improved derma-peel. Each of which promises a brand new sexier you. But there is a world beyond the glare of the TV screen where women are organizing and fighting for - not a new toy but a new world.

On March 8, women around the world in LA, England, Argentina, Uganda, Peru, Philadelphia, San Francisco, in Guyana, in southern India, in Trinidad and Tobago, in Spain, women will be staging the fifth global women's strike.

A movement involving women in some sixty countries many involved in grass roots organizations. Fighting for payment for housework, for clean safe water resources, for housing, education, gender justice, and peace. In a world where war is now our norm, the global women's strike is part of the vast throng against war and occupation. Not only in Iraq, but in Palestine, in Columbia, in the Congo and in Kashmir. Their organizing slogan, which unites strikers from a broad array of struggles, is deceptively simple: 'Invest in Caring not Killing.'

Although the movement had its beginning years ago in the '[Wages] for Housework' movement in England, it has grown considerably into a worldwide antiracist and antiwar movement. The movement recognizes the basic inequality built into the capitalist economic system. The class, racial and gender based exploitation underlying it all. Women's issues differ from nation to nation and between classes in the same nation.

Yet there are also similarities in the fundamentals underlying those differences. On the supportive role played by women in the home, Marxist, feminist Selma James in her influential 1973 pamphlet 'Sex, Race and Class' writes: 'House wives are involved in the production and, what is the same thing, reproduction of workers. What Marx calls labor power. They service those who are daily destroyed by working for wages and who need to be daily renewed and they care for and discipline those who are being prepared to work when they grow up.' At base, James argues, because women's work performs such a critical role in capitalist reproduction, it should receive a commensurate return.

All around the world women are trying to better their condition and that of families and communities. In England, Crossroads Women's center at 230a Kentish Town Road, London NW5 2AB, is coordinating the strike. Their email address is womenstrike8m@server101.com.

In Peru the Centro de Capacitacion para Trabajadoras del Hogar in Lima can be emailed at ccth@terra.com.pe.

In Trinidad and Tobago, the National Union of Domestic Employees are organizing, their email address: domestic@tstt.net.tt.

Here in the US, there are Crossroads women's centers in LA, San Francisco, and Philadelphia. Their email addresses are simple:
la@crossroadswomen.net
sf@crossroadswomen.net
philly@crossroadswomen.net

Those without Internet access can call them by phone.
LA (323)-292-7405
San Francisco (415) 626-4114
Phily (215)-848-1120

In Kampala, Uganda the Kaabong Women's Organization is concerned not with war in a distant land, but war at home. For Uganda, there has been war for the past 17 years. Their demand is not just for peace, but for land and for water. For there, as in much in the rest of the world, agriculture rests on the backs of billions of women. The Kaabong Women's organization can be emailed: akulum@hotmail.com. "Invest in Caring, not Killing", hmm what a concept.

From Death Row this is Mumia Abu Jamal.
http://www.prisonradio.org/maj/maj_2_26_04half.html


Long version: mp3, 4 MBs, 4:49
Medium version: mp3, 3.25 MBs, 3:50
Short version: mp3, 2.53 MBs, 2:56

Eloquent, effective Mumia. No wonder they try to stifle him.

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Tuesday, March 8, 2005

V for Vendetta is now underway. . .
BERLIN, GERMANY, March 4, 2005 – The Wachowski Brothers and Joel Silver, the creators and producer of the revolutionary, $1.6 billion-grossing Matrix trilogy, have launched production on the action thriller V For Vendetta, starring Natalie Portman (Star Wars: Episodes I-III, Closer, Garden State), James Purefoy (Vanity Fair, Resident Evil) and Stephen Rea (Interview with the Vampire, The Crying Game) in Berlin, Germany. Filming began March 7, 2005. [via: chromewaves]

* "Veal Pen". The new "it" phrase. Kill it Strike it from your vocabulary before it multiplies. It's tomorrow's language equivilent of the Macarena and must join the ranks of "outisde the box" and "that said". So many intelligent writers. So little originality.

* International Women's Day is being celebrated globally. Did you celebrate youself today?

* What makes you feel sensual? Take the quiz on Every Woman Is A Goddess.

* Music for you website at Music Video Codes. Slap on your pop-up blocker and go! MusicVideoCodes.com is the largest Music Video Code provider on the Internet today. We provide two types of codes for each video. The code just below the video is intended to be used on any website, blog, or profile that allows embed HTML tags.

* Coming Soon - Mazal Tov Cocktail - An encyclopedia of jewish Radical Culture.

May inspiration fill your heart and hands, run down your legs and cause spontaneous dancing.

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Thursday, December 16, 2004

FOXBlocker is an innovative new product that filters out the FOX News network. Simply screw the filter into the back of your TV and never be exposed to right wing propaganda again (at least through FOX News). Using a proprietary technology, the FOXBlocker works to filter out FOX News from your cable lineup. Protect yourself and your family, or send one to a misguided right wing friend. [more...]

Farscape star Ben Browder will join the cast of SCI FI's original series Stargate SG-1. [more...]

ZeFrank's Create and Send your own Christmas Cards. These honking elves left me seriously bent.

Next mood swing in five, four, three......

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Wednesday, October 20, 2004

A conversation between Kurt Vonnegut and out-of-print science fiction writer Kilgore Trout. It was to be their last. Trout committed suicide by drinking Drano at midnight on October 15 in Cohoes, New York, after a female psychic using tarot cards predicted that the environmental calamity George W. Bush would once again be elected president of the most powerful nation on the planet by a five-to-four decision of the Supreme Court, which included “100 per-cent of the black vote.”

Buy Nothing Day - November 26.

I'm back home and hope to return to blogspeed soon with a whole lotta visits and postings going on. xoxo

Take revenge: Shit on a pigeon.



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Tuesday, July 13, 2004

Farscape Returns in October
SCI FI announced it will be bringing back Farscape with an all-new miniseries — called Farscape: Peacekeeper War — slated to air in the fourth quarter of this year. The four-hour miniseries picks up where the cliffhanger series finale left off and will reunite John Crichton (Ben Browder), Aeryn Sun (Claudia Black) and the rest of the Moya crew. Four-hour mini series Oct 17. I'm still enjoying the re-runs.

(via: the most excellent ollapodrida)

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Monday, April 5, 2004


Always enjoy looking in on Dave Cooper's site. His unique style is unmistakable [link]

After regular cuppa java #4, I sent out for espresso to quell the Monday morning blahs. And a Dr Enuf.

{Monday's Browsing}
::FreewayBlogger
Dedicated to free speech and guerilla artists everywhere

:: Sniggle - Culture Jammer's Encylopedia
[via: infoshop]

:: Coffee and Cigarettes trailer. Short stories from Jim Jarmusch that all have coffee and cigarettes in common. [link]

{Quote For Today}
"Free Speech is the right to yell 'Theater!' in a crowded fire." - Abbie Hoffman

Have envelope. Will push.

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Tuesday, December 23, 2003

»Asheville Artist, James Bursenos, has some nice art on his site, including his interpretation of Santa that was featured in the recent Cannabis Culture, explaining the Psychedelic Secrets of Santa Claus. [via: mefi]

»Any of you out there remember "The Sponge"? Elaine of Seinfeld fame helped popularize them when she'd deem some poor prospective date as "sponge-worthy". It may be available again soon after further testing. Viva la Safe & Spontaneous Sex!

{blog site of the day} KnitWitology

I'm not getting older...I'm getting bitter.

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Thursday, August 21, 2003

Good morning to you.

While Attorney General John Ashcroft distracts us by parading around the country touting the Patriot Act, the equally dangerous, overly broad Victory Act bill is making the rounds through Congressional offices. The full name of the bill is the Vital Interdiction of Criminal Terrorist Organizations Act of 2003. [via: talk left]

"Did a young woman every think you were homosexual just because you wouldn't have sex with her? Be serious! Were you ever taunted and made to feel bad or 'uncool' because of your choice? But most of all, be real. Kids can sense a phony a mile away." Inquired Al Franken of John Ashcroft recently to include in his upcoming book. [more]

BlogTV - Still trying to figure out exactly what this is used for. [via: 601am]

Dalai Lama-palooza? The Dalai Lama comes back strong in September, with the hype of a concert tour.

Phish's Mike Gordon arrested for taking pictures of 9-year-old girl in a secluded boathouse after Jones Beach concert. The girl's father is described as a "Hells Angels leader." Are pervs more rampant now, or are we just more aware of them with all the media saturation?

Photo Portal to the Art, Technique, History and Culture of Photography for my photo blogging friends. [via: iconomy]

Today's Quote:
"They're still at it, so I'm still at it."
Daniel Ellsberg, American peace activist
Source: Late Night Live, August 20, 2003

I still miss my ex-husband. But my aim is improving. {Hi, Jamie.}

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Sunday, July 21, 2002

Purr-fect TV: Company developing show for cats



Esther Friesner fluffed the pink boa draped across her neck, adjusted her Cat Woman ears, thanked her cats for their support and summoned forth her best inner feline. [via: CNN]



Friesner, a science fiction writer from Connecticut, was one of dozens of adults and kids Wednesday trying out for a spot on "Meow TV," a new show being shopped around for the fall season for cats. No, not for cat lovers. For cats.


Well, hell, I've seen it all now. I love my cat, but I would never have imagined a tv show made just for cats to watch. I wonder if my cat, Jinx, will watch? He doesn't even stay IN the house long enough to check out the television. He comes in to eat, then just as soon as he's eaten, he meows to go back outside and he's in the wind. "No time to chat, gotta go-o-o-o-o."

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THE WEBSITE NAME

THE WEBSITE NAME
The Simpsons' Treehouse of Horror VIII

ABOUT EBC

It wasn't long after 9/11, September 11, 2001, that I began this website. I felt compelled to connect with other people around the globe. I had recently heard about "weblogs" or "blogs" and I dove right into Blogger.com. I searched for others to connect with online and I found Ageless. It led to meeting many great friends to discuss events of the day. From then on it snowballed. Most importantly we offered one another support and friendship across the globe; finding that we were just a few keystrokes away.

ASHEVILLE WLOS LIVECAM

    Blue Ridge Mtns-click for larger view

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