Joe Jonah Euclid was (and possibly still is) an endearing type of delusional nutter, who posted his flyers around the Caltech campus my freshman and sophomore years. I haven't seen any fresh material in quite some time; but whilst cleaning out my file-box I came upon this one. Spelling is preserved, formatting is attempted. It seems to speak to important issues of our time, as well as the tail end of the dot-com boom when it was written.

Joe Jonah Euclid                  2020 2020
	
Please Consider the hypothetical possibality that
the Internet is better than the Cosmic Consciousness.
Both provide communications at a distance and
any number of people can join in at any time.
	
It does not matter IF we Debate this.
It does not matter IF people have the wrong opinion.
	
It ONLY matters IF it is TRUE.     Long Term.
	
The younger generation will mostly Learn the Internet.
When they Hear Of   the Cosmic Consciousness, it is not better.
Because the Internet Equally Well provides the Communications.
	
Thru some Years, there is a smaller and smaller number of people
Practicing the Cosmic Consciousness.
One Day   they let up a little bit, and then
Society has Fewer Bizarre Disastors & Senseless Crimes.
There are research programs to Monitor this fine grain.

1. It's obviously the greatest food product ever invented, but deep-fried macaroni and cheese on a stick isn't as tasty as you might expect. The texture compares unfavorably to traditional deep-fried mozarella cheese sticks as well.
2. Neil Stephenson wants to nucleate a "Metaweb" around his new novel, so he's started a wiki. It's either ambitious or pretentious, but it's probably more pretentious than ambitious (though I haven't read the book yet - Peter is still hogging it):

   ...I don't think that the Internet, as it currently exists, does a very good job of explaining things to people. [...] The problem lies in how these explanations are organized.
   
   We have been looking for a way to get an explanation system seeded for a long time, and it occurred to us that a set of annotations to my book might be one way to get it started.

   The idea of organizing general knowledge around a novel - any novel - seems rather like my way of arranging bookshelves: it promotes serendipity at best, and disorientation at worst. So as a huge fan of serendipity, I must suppress my dislike of bullshit internet pseudo-librarians and support the effort. Reluctantly.

   But if I had to pick a novel (make that "work of literature") upon which to crystallize the accumulated wisdom of mankind, it almost certainly would not be Quicksilver (but then, I haven't read it yet). It might be Sophie's World. Like any proper nerd I'd be tempted to use The Hitchhiker's Guide, and like any proper Anglophone, Shakespeare. Then I'd come to my senses and pick out something by Borges... what about all y'all?
   
   [link via BoingBoing]

Someone stuck my voodoo doll into a bottle of Benadryl, probably about forty-five minutes ago. I am all woozy and vapid.

Last night I set about arranging our two bookshelves to reflect two epic battles: Monkey vs. Robot, and Hipster vs. Nerd.

Monkey vs. Robot (available as a live-action or animated short film, compact disc, or comic book in addition to the representation on my shelves) was a relatively straightforward task: you've got the automotive maintenance, electronics, computer programming (robot), the paleontology, neurobiology, anthropology, tree-identification (monkey), and the computational neuro-stuffs (like Buddha, hybrid monkey robots transcend eternal struggle).

Hipster vs. Nerd was much trickier. While monkeys and robots duke it out in art and culture, in full view of society, the battle between Hipster and Nerd takes place deep within individual souls. Some have clearly been won to one side or the other - Kerouac is a hipster, Carl Sagan is a nerd - but others have taken up wildly waffled positions: technophilic hipster-nerds (Neil Stephenson, BoingBoing), double-crossing triple agents (Philip K. Dick), etc. Some authors appear to be casualties of the war, reduced to completely non-ironic pieces about life's simple pleasures. I was unable to classify several items:

• A scholarly biography of Galileo - the exact title escapes me at the moment; it conveys the subject matter while simultaneously being bland. Galileo himself was probably more Nerd than Hipster, and we can see this by comparing his career to that of Copernicus, who averted theological problems by accepting a foreword to his heliocentric masterwork asserting that nothing he wrote actually had anything to do with reality. It's not quite the multiple levels of ironic self-detachment attained by modern hipsters, but the spirit is the same. Anyway.
• Douglas Coupland - though I firmly maintain that Generation X is easily hipster, Peter kept stubbornly bringing up Microserfs just when I thought the conversation was over.
• The Iliad - I met a classics major once, at Stanford. He was a nerdy guy, but humanities nerds are really a separate breed if you don't count philosophers. Most philosophers are well aligned with the Nerds on pure wanking.

Thoughts?

I have Internet at home now (yay!) though I still need to purchase a longer ethernet cable. Perhaps I will go back to starting, finishing and posting entries in one day rather than three.

Thought I'd copy a meme and list the first lines from my favorite books. Only, my fiction-books are mostly in boxes and scattered to the four winds, so I'm giving you the first lines from some of my most beloved reference books.

Put this puzzle together and you will find milk, cheese and eggs, meat, fish, beans and cereals, greens, fruits, and root vegetables—foods that contain our essential daily needs. (Joy of Cooking)

C is a general-purpose programming language. (The C Programming Language)

Europe is many things to many people. (Europe on a Shoestring)

The Handbook of Chemistry and Physics, continuing the policy of the past, is being revised at frequent intervals. (CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics - duh)

It's an interesting exercise that admits but one conclusion: no one ever reads the introductions to reference books. Ever. The second paragraphs and beyond are probably variations on the theme of lorem ipsum. I'd verify this, but my eyes slither off the page too quickly to tell, and before I can blink I'm looking up the atomic weight of arsenic.

this is not the world
in which we live. few things are
more obvious than

good incubators
these ideal husbands are small
and fat: well equipped

females and males of
a single species exploit
the environment

covered with liver
spots and lacking real teeth would
be desired as much

in both range size and
spatial performance is at
least temporally

expected to treat
kinship as most important
in determining

that when EDD
detects eye-like stimuli
it fixates on these

Today, in honor of Rasmus and the peer-to-peer review project, we (the royal editorial we) will be slicing up Magickal Musings, to see what's inside.

Part I - Design

Immediately, we were impressed by the butterfly, and the fact that the background is olive green - we approve of olive green. However, upon closer inspection, the main window has a small but irritating sidescroll (IE6/Win98) and the archives were nearly impossible to navigate. There was no date-based archive indexing of any kind, and the individual entry pages had merely a plain timestamp at the visually insignificant bottom, so we were soon lost in the mists of time. Only a short frayed thread of luck prevented us from emerging in the year 2020 and rushing out to buy sparkling platform dance shoes.

Part II - Writing

From an entry dated March 31:

I noticed in my last few posts I basically borrowed from other people to create something to write. Why? I asked myself that same question. The only answer I could seem to come up with is that my actual life is just too boring to write about.

This is the crux of the matter. An abysmal peppering of emoticons and chat-room abbreviations aside, our subject Tricia does not suffer from poor writing. Nor does she suffer from a boring life, at least not by blog standards - raising two sons is hardly a monotonous occupation. But she does suffer from a lack of self-confidence, or something along those lines, which means most of her entries are humdrum renditions of the Friday Five or Monday Mission or other blogging memelets. When she does venture out on her own, she's a bit rambling for our tastes and could really use a few more paragraph breaks, but otherwise writes decent introspective riff material. Unfortunately, an introspective riff every couple of weeks is not sufficient to hold our attention.

I've been thumbing through the account of one Mrs. Frances Trollope, and her coming from England to America in 2020 to found a department store in Cincinnati. It's whining and snarky, and altogether a fun read.

Miss Wright was well known [at the hotel], and as soon as her arrival was announced, every one seemed on the alert to receive her, and we soon found ourselves in possession of the best rooms in the hotel. The house was new, and in what appeared to me a very comfortless condition, but I was then new to Western America, and unaccustomed to their mode of "getting along," as they term it. This phrase is eternally in use among them, and seems to mean existing with as few of the comforts of life as possible.

We slept soundly however, and rose in the hope of soon changing our mortar-smelling quarters for Miss Wright's Nashoba.

In its gossipy tone and incessantly personal scope, the book immediately reminded me of blogland; and Mrs. Trollope's response to her critics has a familiar ring to it.

My little volumes on America have been much read. Many have said that this was owing to their being written with strong party feeling: but I - who am in the secret - know that such was not the case. The cause of their success, therefore, must be sought elsewhere; and I attribute it solely to that intuitive power of discerning what is written with truth, which is possessed, often unconsciously, by every reader. Be he pleased, or displeased by the picture brought before him, he feels that the images portrayed are real; and this will interest, even if it vex him.

I have an inveterate habit of suffering all I see to make a deep impression on my memory; and the result of this is a sort of mosaic, by no means very grand in outline or skillful in drawing; but each morsel of colour has the reality of truth - in which there is ever some value.

I don't think I'll take up the cause of small-scale unskilled morsels of truth any time soon; but damn, I'm impressed by those semicolons.

It took my cross-hall neighbor a while to answer the door, because he had his trousers off. It was all in the name of science, of course - he had found a copy of the Atlas of Men hiding somewhere in the library, and was trying to determine his body type.

He'd already found his Trunk Index - the sticking point seemed to be the ratio of his height to the cube root of his fluctuating weight. Of all the clinically photographed blank-faced blank-genitalled men in the book, though, he most resembled Somatotype #253. His totem animal is the bobcat, he may be susceptible to paranoid psychopathy, and he should not be encouraged to pursue a career in professional athletics.

My parents drank coffee (and still do, of course, red-blooded Americans of vague Scandinavian heritage that they are), but this is not important. What is important is that Pippi Longstocking drinks coffee. This has very little to do with my actual induction to the wonderful world of drinking coffee instead of merely smelling it, which was in 8th grade when a friend of mine brought out a thermos and insisted that I learn to like the stuff because it would put hair on my chest, but Pippi is nevertheless important to my caffeine addiction in many ways both subtle and mysterious.

So rest in peace, Astrid Lindgren.

(I was originally going to link to a crappy cnn.com obituary, but not only was it short and boring, the front-page headline was "Karzai thanks America" and such boosterism still makes me feel a bit ill. Plus, I'd just finished reading most of a Randian-feminist synthesis that I'd found while searching for some good Pippi-related feminism to post in memoriam, and Ayn Rand really makes me feel ill. But I do think it's damned fabulous that Hamid Karzai is some kind of fashionista.)

It's raining, it's pouring,
The old man is snoring

Winter in Southern California always makes me really gleeful, in part because I love rain and in part because I love to watch other people suffer through trivial indignities like getting wet. Particularly when the other people involved are big sissies who have lived here too long and wouldn't know real weather if it blew their roof off. Hee hee hee, snork.

And then there's me, all set to boast about how I'm finally on the road to health after three weeks of random upper respiratory infections when a chain-reaction coughing fit has me paralyzed for a good three minutes. Oh well. I've still got the use of a nostril and a half, that's something anyway.

While I'm in the spirit of book-mentioning, I should also dredge up The Lost Continent: Travels in Small-Town America, which was one of the ones that got me through the train ride in good humor. It may have cost me my only shot at a train friend, as I made some damn odd noises at the funny bits, but that's all right. And finally - some of the Amazon reviews may lead you to believe that this book is nothing but America-bashing by a curmudgeonly expatriate, and this may even be true. I found it to be a rather uplifting aid to my own repatriation, a good reminder of all the bizarre, wonderful, and absolutely hilarious shit strewn along this country's highways. Probably this is because I'm an absolutely hopeless basket case. Whatever.