I've noticed that web adverts have been getting more and more evil lately. I highly recommend using WebWasher. It's free and easy and it makes the net faster and much less distracting and annoying.

Study links brain reaction to music, sex, food - "Brain structures that are activated by food or sex are also turned on by music, researchers report Tuesday in a study."

E-BOMB: In the blink of an eye, electromagnetic bombs could throw civilization back 200 years. And terrorists can build them for $400.

The next Pearl Harbor will not announce itself with a searing flash of nuclear light or with the plaintive wails of those dying of Ebola or its genetically engineered twin. You will hear a sharp crack in the distance. By the time you mistakenly identify this sound as an innocent clap of thunder, the civilized world will have become unhinged. Fluorescent lights and television sets will glow eerily bright, despite being turned off. The aroma of ozone mixed with smoldering plastic will seep from outlet covers as electric wires arc and telephone lines melt. Your Palm Pilot and MP3 player will feel warm to the touch, their batteries overloaded. Your computer, and every bit of data on it, will be toast. And then you will notice that the world sounds different too. The background music of civilization, the whirl of internal-combustion engines, will have stopped. Save a few diesels, engines will never start again. You, however, will remain unharmed, as you find yourself thrust backward 200 years, to a time when electricity meant a lightning bolt fracturing the night sky. This is not a hypothetical, son-of-Y2K scenario. It is a realistic assessment of the damage the Pentagon believes could be inflicted by a new generation of weapons--E-bombs.

Does anyone out there have tickets for the upcoming (sold out) Bjork show in Boston? Please?

What I Would Say to Osama bin Laden: An interview with Thich Nhat Hanh.

I consider Thich Nhat Hanh to be one of my greatest teachers. I urge you to read what he has to say.

Ok, ok, so I am (also) addicted to Spaced Penguin. What can I say?

If you like music with beautiful/evocative melodies and basslines, cutting edge electronic manipulation, crisp beats, smooth arrangement, and super clean/rich production, you must check out the new album "Fahrenheit Fair Enough" by Telefon Tel Aviv. This is some of the best stuff I have heard in awhile. Highly recommended.

I finally took some pictures of our new place with my cheapo webcam. The photo quality is terrible, but it should at least give you an idea of what it's like:

• The living room. Still under construction.
• Our bedroom.
• The opposite wall of the bedroom.
• Hunter taking a message in the kitchen.
• The kitchen.
• My side of the studio.
• Hunter's side of the studio.
• Cozy back porch.
• Ahh.. the hammock.
• The view from out on the front deck (to the left).
• The view from out on the front deck (straight ahead).
• The view from out on the front deck (to the right).
• The basketball courts across the street.
• The view from out on the front deck (to the left again, notice the skyline).

"Instead of getting at the root of emotion in general, what is being suggested is the application of antidotes that are appropriate to specific negative emotions and thoughts. For example, to counter anger, you should cultivate love and compassion. To counter strong attachment to an object, you should cultivate thoughts about the impurity of that object, its undesirable nature, and so on. To counter one's arrogance or pride, you need to reflect upon shortcomings in you that can give rise to a sense of humility. For example, you can think about all the things in the world about which you are completely ignorant. Take the sign language interpreter here in front of me. When I look at her and see the complex gestures with which she performs the translation, I haven't a clue what is going on, and to see that is quite a humbling experience. From my own personal experience, whenever I have a little tingling sense of pride, I think of computers. It really calms me down!"

--His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama of Tibet.

(via dle)

There's a new site exclusive track available for download from the Team Techno site. Go now, click, boogie!

Some good news.

Old Taoist Story:

When his wife died, a friend came to offer condolences, but he found Zhuang-zi squatting on the ground and singing, beating on an earthen bowl instead of performing the mourning rites. The friend was scandalized and rebuked him: "To live with your wife, and see your eldest son grow up to be a man, and then not to shed a tear over her corpse - this would be bad enough. But to drum on a bowl and sing; surely this is going too far!"

"Not at all," replied Zhuang-zi. "When she died I could not help being affected by her death. Soon, however, I remembered that she had already existed in a previous state before birth, without form or even substance; that while in that unconditioned condition, substance was added to spirit; that this substance then assumed form; and that the next stage was birth. And now, by virtue of a further change, she is dead, passing from one phase to another like the sequence of spring, summer, autumn and winter. And while she is thus lying asleep in eternity, for me to go about weeping and wailing would be to proclaim myself ignorant of these natural laws. Therefore I refrain".

There was once a little wave, bobbing along in the ocean, having a grand old time. He's enjoying the wind and the fresh air -- until he notices the other waves in front of him, crashing against the shore. "My God, this is terrible," the wave says. "Look what's going to happen to me!" Then along comes another wave. It sees the first wave, looking grim, and it says to him, "Why do you looks so sad?" The first wave says, "You don't understand! We're all going to crash! All of us waves are going to be nothing! Isn't it terrible?" The second wave says, "No, YOU don't understand. You're not a wave, you're part of the ocean."

Run From Ground Zero by Paul Ford

When I began writing, I was going to criticize the New York Times for putting together a big magazine section with A-list writers like Richard Powers discussing metaphor in relation to the prose and a memorial already designed with 5,000 human beings missing. All the awful mediation, complete bullshit smeared over the camera lens, people being told to move on with their lives, grief counselors intervening, big names and small all pointing out a way forward, explaining why it happened, explaining that we brought it on ourselves. Calling for war and calling for reason. All these endless voices, all these living voices. All the sounds and words, headlines and big graphics, war, war, war, war, war, war. Everything is being narrowed down into a pinpoint of triteness and then being shined directly in our eyes, and I feel blinded by it, deafened, numbed by the explosion of content and concepts, the racism and the interpretations, the urgent desire of individuals to put their own stamp on the events.

I don't have a stamp for the events. I don't have an interpretation, or an analysis, or a story to tell other than my own distant, simple one. I sort of know what happened, and that it will have consequences, and that everyone is upset, and that I'm going home early and I don't know how my friends are, and I don't have a job. I know that my friends all have different-sounding voices on the phone. I cannot bear any more shrill annotations added to the footage of the falling buildings by newspaper writers and anchorpersons. Everyone wants ownership, to stake their claim, to link to the most Web sites, to make the most accurate predictions, to criticize every possible leader, to cast blame, to matter. But they don't matter. The dead matter. The grieving matter. The war matters. The media is throwing up walls of content, filled with instructions on how to feel, when there is absolutely no right way to feel, when this will not be going away, when there is no way to own what happened, no way to possess the misery for yourself. Why would you want to?

My remix of Mall's "High and Outside" is now available for free download. It was rejected from the remix compilation because it sounded "too different" from the original. Ya know, there's a reason for that. Anyway... Check it out. I'm proud of this one.

Make it Green by Roger Ebert

(found via Kottke who is also doing a wonderful job covering the recent events.)

An Afghan-American speaks by Tamim Ansary.

You can't bomb us back into the Stone Age. We're already there. But you can start a new world war, and that's exactly what Osama bin Laden wants.

From CounterPunch:

Least credible news footage: CNN's videotape of Palestinians supposedly dancing in the streets of a West Bank town. CounterPuncher Marcio A.V. Carvalho at the state university of Campinas in Brazil tells us that he and his colleagues had compared this tape with one from 1991 showing Palestinian cheering, and found them to be identical.

Some independent net folks are doing an wonderful job covering Tuesday's attacks. In particular, I highly recommend checking out Megnut, Follow Me Here, Red Rock Eater Digest, and BookNotes.

The Dalai Lama's letter to the President of the United States of America

Imagine.

"An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind." --Gandhi

This page is the first result when you search on Google for "William Fields". But, it shows the category as: Society > Sexuality > Sexual Addiction. Strange.

This is hilarious. (via Nutlog)

UK Children Cause Earthquake in Giant Jump

Around one million British school children succeeded in causing an earthquake on Friday, jumping up and down simultaneously in the world's largest scientific experiment.

I apologize to my frequent vistors for the recent lack of updates. There are just too many interesting things to check out here in the real world (with my recent move to the city).

It's really quite overwhelming. There are just TOO MANY things, you can't keep track of them all, and you always feel like your missing something great. For example, there are a tons of wonderful college radio stations up here that are constantly playing great stuff. There's one that plays Jazz in the morning, World Music in the afternoon, Reggae in the late afternoon, Hiphop in the evening, and Electronic late night! What more could I ask for? Last night I saw the film Lumumba. On Wednesday, I'm going to see Richard Devine, Phonecia, and friends. On Saturday, it's To Rococo Rot and Marumari.

Sorry if it sounds like I'm boasting, but having all this cultural activity around is new to me. As my friend Mike put it, "Already reaping the benefits of living somewhere that doesn't suck!"

Benetton Photog Blasts Tech

"The future is seen as one in which scientific and technological evolution combined with branding will create a blemish-free, pain-free, shiny, sanitized world, one in which the sometime ugliness of the human reality will be excluded for fear of upsetting the codes.

"Technology and communication feed our fears. They reinforce our deepest insecurities, that our survival depends on material wealth and power.... So in the absence of faith, ideology, religious foundations, the last edited images, the hollow emptiness of cyberspace, the digital mirage leaves us yearning for sustenance at an existential level."

What to do about that? Again and again, Toscani returned to the theme of resisting mass culture -- or, in the case of digital artists, resisting the urge to do things just because you can, rather than out of any strong and clear inspiration.

"The artist should have the power to free himself from his own fear," he said. "We have to have the courage to risk being different."

Back online... with cable modem! Normality should return soon.

We're all moved in. My muscles are aching. There's still much to do. Painting, cleaning, organizing, setting up. The place is beautiful. Spacious, amazing view, beautiful hardwood floors, large windows, 2 decks... The neighborhood seems very nice. Mostly younger people, and pretty diverse. Basketball courts across the street, grocery store, video store, restaurants, music shop, subway stop all within a short walk. ..and I don't really feel like I'm in a city. There are trees everywhere you look... no real tall buildings. It feels more like a small town. I hope to set up the webcam and take some stills to put up here soon. Ok, gotta get back to work.

We're currently stopped over in Rhode Island, and in about an hour we're going to head up to Boston. Everything we own is in a 15' Ryder truck... yesterday was exhausting. Thank you to everyone who helped out. I love you guys! We're in for another big day today, but the weather is absolutely beautiful. Gotta run, more soon....

Archives: Aug 2001 Jul 2001 Jun 2001 May 2001 Apr 2001 Mar 2001 Feb 2001

[Discussion/Comments/Feedback]

Powered by...