Something you don’t see every day – in fact, something I didn’t know existed until two hours ago. A Citroën Mehari – 602 cubic centimeters of tonnerre! The body is ABS and it reminds me a bit of a Kurierwagen/dune buggy mashup. It looks like a lot of fun, but one wonders about (minor) collision safety…
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Update: Check out citroenazu’s Flickrstream – fantastic!
Maybe it’s just the zeitgeist in the corner of the universe I inhabit, but I gotta admit, last night’s Venture Bros. episode made me do a little victory dance. First off, we got to meet Col. Venture – Hank and Dean’s great (great-great?) grandfather – a guy who flies around in an airship with Sam Clemens, Fantomas, Oscar Wilde, Aleister Crowley and Sandow pursued by Nikola Tesla. Cement the retrofuture-steampunk-Venture connection? I’d say so. Also – a glimpse at the origin of the Guild of Calamitous Intent. Then, during a commecial break, this ad for Scion.
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Say what you will about the Scion line (I understand many are put off by the officialitude of the Scion factory mod parts) the fact remains that what they are trying to do is to tap into the customizer vibe – something that I noted earlier.
Update – I predict the orb is either a seed (universal self-replicator as in The Diamond Age) or a complete kludge/failure – or both. If it’s a seed, I really appreciate its incremental genesis – like the Cryptonomicon in the eponymous novel. Is Jackson Publick a fan of Neal Stephenson?
I took a camera with me this morning when I ran the dogs. We’ve had three weeks of very wet weather (a flash flood killed a girl a few days ago and a tornado killed a lady up the road in Northwood a week and a half ago) – if it’s not pouring all day, there’s almost always thunderstorms in the afternoon. I figured the wet ought to encourage fungi to fruit – turned out to be a good guess. I’ve pulled Toads and Toadstools
The Oyster River in August is normally low enough to walk across using stepping stones without getting your feet wet – this is obviously not a normal year.
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I think one of the local bruins ate too many green apples and gave himself an upset stomach.
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The Sun God. It’s not hard to see why toadstools are so important to old religions and folkways. You’ve got solar discs and phalluses emerging spontaneously from Mom Earth – let the myth making proceed!
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The big guy – Amanita. I still like Wasson’s soma theory, even if there are other equally good candidates – its a rippin’ idea.
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Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.
A big nod to Lord Whimsy for the proximate stimulus and to the Querencistas, where fungoblogging is a tradition.
I told Matt M. ages ago that I’d post some thoughts on steampunk – here goes nothin’.
First, a little scope narrowing/definition – the steampunk I’m talking about is the steampunk of things – the design sensibility that takes inspiration both from Verne et al. and from the second generation of steampunk lit. It’s too bad Gaslight Romance didn’t take as an appellation for gen 2; it’s more accurate, but -punk seems to be to speculative fiction genres what -gate is to political scandals. So, across the board, punk it shall be, though the first generation – Gibson, Sterling and friends – was the true punk: a critique rather than a celebration. Steampunk things, especially now that the subject is getting some mainstream attention, can be all over the place. If pressed, I’d offer up a top hat and goggles as the essential pieces of clothing and when it comes to other ‘stuff’, I’m going to point to Jake Von Slatt’s keyboard and Morse code RSS reader as sitting firmly at the center of the Steampunk universe.
Steampunk is the child of maker culture. I’ve posted about makers before – the steampunk practice of modding, hacking and fabricating is of a piece with what many others are doing to make commodity items uniquely their own. Steammakers are well positioned: many of their favorite materials – brass, wood, leather – are relatively easy to work and they are echoing/emulating a period when the inventor in his workshop was paradigmatic (they don’t call ’em Edisonades for nothing). If you want to tinker, taking as your model a period when the tinkerer was king ain’t a bad idea. Doing it in a time when sharing ideas and information with like minded people is incredibly easy? Another good idea.
If maker kulturny is how, retrofuturism is why. Retrofuturism (or postmodern paleo-futurism, if you prefer) addresses a fundamental question: “Where’s my friggin’ flying car?” More seriously, it’s an attempt to look at past visions of the future to see what we can learn about the times the predictions were made in and figure out something about how the world works (why were the predictions so wide of the mark). For many of us, retrofuturism and disappointment go hand in hand – I was brought up on Mercury, Gemini and Apollo, saw 2001: A Space Odyssey on my tenth birthday and bought into the Star Trek “Little UN on the Bridge” vision of science and Vulcan rationality overwhelming all our petty differences (yeah, I know Kirk was white, male and a bit of a hound, but you have to start somewhere). Where are we now? It’s been 35 years since Apollo 17 left the moon – we’re dinking around in low earth orbit, going noplace fast. Further, if you take a hard look at the distances and energy budgets involved in interstellar travel you’re left with a choice between non-starter and Clarke’s 3rd law. Yes, the future will involve magic tech, but relying on the Underpants Gnomes (collect underpants, ?, a starship!) isn’t where I’ll be putting my money. The ultra-modern future predicted in the sixties is nowhere to be found and the road to Infinity and Beyond has a Darien Gap the size of the Pacific in it. Instead, what we have looks disturbingly like plain old day-to-day life.
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I’m going to skate past the fact that the world has changed – maybe even progressed – quite a bit since ’68 and ignore the incredible stuff our metal and silicon kids are doing around the solar system. Part of it is that we tend to adapt to change when we’re in the middle of it. Cell phones? Yeah, yeah, sure, sure. GPS receivers in damn near everything? Yawn. Another piece – and the root of retrofuturist disappointment IMHO – is the tendency of sci-fi types and futurists to concentrate on extremes – Mad Max or Futurama II. Utopia or dystopia; is there a word for a -topia where baldness is an issue, where kids get frustrated with their parents, where one waits in long lines to renew a drivers license? The biggest single tech change of the last quarter century – data networking/the Internet – is used to connect people to each other and to information with unprecedented ease. It’s also used for v1agr@ spam, 419s and zombies. The problem with the future is that there are people in it – a fact that I think we’re realizing.
I know I’m veering a bit, but I need to acknowledge the ultimate superscience sendup – The Venture Bros.
The series’ predominant homage is to Jonny Quest, as it is the basis for many of the main characters. Dr. Venture is loosely modeled on Benton Quest, Brock likewise on Race Bannon, and the Venture boys correspond to Jonny and Hadji. The comparisons, however, are taken to the level of an extreme parody by making the characters the “next generation” after an age of scientific heroism – and the next generation doesn’t always fare well.
Thus Dr. Venture is a pill-popping, barely-competent scientist who treats his children and those around him with overt disdain and contempt; Brock is a hyper-macho man with a (frequently used) license to kill; and the boys are nincompoops stuck in an out-of-date mindset. One newspaper critic remarked, “if filmmakers Woody Allen and Sam Peckinpah had collaborated on Jonny Quest, it would have come out a lot like this.” *
We have seen the future and it looks like a cross between the alley behind a liquor store and a Massachusetts DMV office (with costumed supervillians!). (Also – proof blogging makes you smarter – I knew I’d seen the Venture Industries building somewhere before – now I know where.)
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So… recent superscience boosterism is bunk. Maybe Verne and company got it right. If not, at least their miscues aren’t within living memory (too cheap to meter, anyone?). Steampunk goes back farther for it’s optimistic vision of the future for practical (brass), thematic (Tesla) and temporal (old enough to be malleable) reasons, but it does – in spite of it’s frequent darkness – have it’s own customized, idiosyncratic view of a possible good life.
Finally, Matt asked whether Steampunk might be the new counterculture. I responded in comments, but I want to elaborate slightly. The 60s/early 70s counterculture – as a label applied by the mainstream – merely identified a large group of people who were not pleased with the way things were going and/or thought they had a better way. Within this population there were a million different tribes and tendencies; one could develop a taxonomy of different kinds of acidheads, let alone try to figure out what tied together SDS, jesus freaks and Merry Pranksters. I think we’re seeing similar kinds of things happening today – makers overlap Steampunks overlap (yes, clothing counts) goth and on and on – with one important exception. The center – mainstream culture – is less dominant and more easily fragmented than it was 40 years ago. It’s CBS/NBC/ABC (then) vs. The Golf Channel/Discovery/Versus/etc., etc. (now) to use an obvious example. Personally, I think this is a good thing – diversity (and tolerance) in cultural systems builds in some resilience – if you’re going to fall victim to groupthink – and you will – smaller, more amorphous groups sound good to me.
I’d like to do my part in the mash-up/creativity/fragmentation movement – allow me to point to a series of posts on Lord Whimsy’s LiveJournal. For those of us who would rather be in the woods than in the workshop – neoleatherstockingism (I gotta clean up that name). Where steampunks have brass goggles, we’ll have silver gorgets (also gunstock clubs, dogs, hawks, optics, net access)! Manifesto to follow – I’m 75% serious about this.
I suppose this blogging is often merely a therapeutic measure, as though one were laying one’s self on Freud’s couch while the great man was out of the room, in his stead standing a curious, humming device much like an evil oboe, which took in one’s spoken words and distributed them across an incredible, instantaneous, world-wide network of tin ear-horns. *
Read the linked posts from the bottom up and enjoy.
I watched North by Northwest (again) last night; what a wonderful movie. So cool – the clothes, the 20th Century Limited, the cars (especially the Continental convertible), Vandamm’s house on the top of Mt. Rushmore and it’s furnishings, even the tail of the Connie in the Chicago airport scene. Just enough vinegar to cut the sweet – at least for a modern viewer – the black faces of the porters on the train are a reminder of how other Americans experienced the 50s.
My favorite aspect of the movie (at this moment – subject to change without notice) is the double MacGuffin. Sure there are the government secrets on microfilm that motivate Alexander Waverly’s The Professor’s pursuit of Vandamm, but I also think Kaplan counts as a MacGuffin – he is Vandamm’s central concern. Hitchcock makes it clear early in the movie that Kaplan doesn’t exist – a perfect placeholder for the characters to play-act around. What could be better? Hitchcock: “People, there’s nothing there, but I’m going to use that empty suit as the center of the story – watch me.”
Put it in your movie queue and when it arrives, mix yourself a nice Gibson, sit back and enjoy. (Editorial comments: 1) Gin, dammit. 2) If you don’t want to drink vermouth, don’t – just call it a cold glass of gin w/ onion or olive – dirty martinis are acceptable – the second component bumps it back to cocktail status).
And the last shot? Canonical.
A recent post on the always excellent BLDGBLOG got me doing a little thinking. First, a long quote from the post:
I have to register my fascination again, however, with the idea that zoos actually represent a kind of spatial hieroglyphics through which humans communicate – or, more accurately, miscommunicate – with other species.
That is, zoos are decoy environments that refer to absent landscapes elsewhere. If this act of reference is read, or interpreted correctly, by the non-human species for whom the landscape has been constructed, then you have a successful zoo. One could perhaps even argue here that there is a grammar – even a deep structure – to the landscape architecture of zoos.
Zoos, in this way of thinking, are at least partially subject to a rhetorical analysis: do they express what they are intended to communicate – and how has this meaning been produced?
Landscape architecture becomes an act not just of stylized geography, or aesthetically shaped terrain, but of communication across species lines.Of course, this can also be inverted: are these landscapes really meant to be read, understood, and interpreted by what we broadly refer to as “animals,” or are these landscapes simply projections of our own inner fantasies of the wild? Or should I say The Wild?
While this latter scenario sounds much more likely to be the case – humans, like a broken cinema, always live inside their own projections – nonetheless, the non-human communicational possibilities of landscape architecture will continue to fascinate me.
Three observations – general, personal and tangential.
General. In the post-wunderkammer/boxes with iron bars era, zoos have tended to define their mission as a mix of conservation (breeding) and education (exhibits). The 2 pieces sometimes don’t align well; often species needing conservation may not be charismatic (lots of LBJs – little brown jobs – need help). Further – when trying to educate the public there’s the animal itself, its behavior (especially in groups) and its habitat. If you want to tie education back to conservation, informing people about the biome is critical – to paraphrase the real estate saw, it’s habitat, habitat, habitat. An accurate, naturalistic setting may not be what you want, though, if breeding is your goal. Keeping track of rations, who’s doing what to who, and controlling environmental parameters (I’m thinking of herps that need to be put in a rain chamber to kick off breeding, for example) may be facilitated by a less complicated – though still far from a white plastic box – enclosure. Two audiences for the landscape architect’s communication – the viewing public and the animals inhabiting the landscape. Two measures of success – does the public come away with a better understanding of how/where the animal lives (and pressures on same) and does the animal display the same range of behaviors it would in it’s home range and does it breed? It’s my impression that zoos deal with this tension by doing a lot of the breeding work off-stage where they can manipulate stimuli without having to worry about a bunch of follicly challenged primates tapping on the glass.
Personal. I keep and breed poison dart frogs. There are many reasons I enjoy them – behavior (parental care, especially), physical beauty, size (manageable); one ties in to this post – the opportunity to do some world-building. Dendrobatids and naturalistic vivaria go together like, I dunno, lobster and butter. You don’t need a planted tank to be successful with darts – lots of leaf litter, some film cannisters or a petri dish – depending on the species’ egg deposition preference – and a mister bottle will usually do the trick. It’s almost the reverse case – you can put PDFs in a planted tank and rather than destroying the plants and trashing the joint, they will settle in and, if you’ve done your world building well, thrive. To circle back to Geoff’s communication point again – I guess I’m trying to communicate with the frogs in an unnecessarily complicated way, with the complexity being for my – the observer’s – benefit.
Tangential. I’m reminded of one of the lines of polarity in fly (as in fly fishing) design: impressionistic vs. realistic. At the extreme, realistic flies don’t serve an aquatic audience at all – they exist solely for the human observer. At the other end of the scale, impressionistic flies are all about trying to guess what attributes stimulate a take. Shape, size, material, etc, are all chosen as a best guess at what makes a hatching caddis look like food to a fish. It’s about listening to what the trout said
Scenario: you are walking in the woods and an exuberant young dog comes gamboling toward you. You fear that the pup is going to jump on you.
DO NOT bend forward at the waist towards the dog, extend your arm and waggle your finger. Dogs are not children – and kids often don’t respect this kind of flailing either. It’s hard to imagine a more counterproductive course of action. Dogs read body language. You are inviting the dog to make contact – getting your face and upper body (the target) closer to the dog and giving it an intermediate focus – your hand, with movement! – to amp the pup up further.
If the dog, after all you’ve done to confuse the issue, does not jump up (yay, Dinah) but instead just makes a couple tight laps around you and takes off, at the very least ignore the dog’s owner (assuming you can’t spare a smile and a nod). A steely glare may cause the owner to cry out “Sic balls, Fang!” the next time you see him (*grin* – not really).
Also – don’t let the dog jump on you. It doesn’t matter if it’s OK with you – it’s probably not OK with 95% of the folks out there. The dog has no way of knowing – short of body language (see point 1) – whether you are a 5 percenter or not, so like a good empiricist, he’ll test – it’s a moderate risk, high payback situation.
DO stand up straight and largely ignore the dog. If the dog does jump make a sound of disapproval – mine sounds like ‘ack’ as uttered by a baritone seagull – and use the word ‘off’ – ‘down’ may mean something else to the dog. Why not use ‘no!’? If the dog is a jumper, chances are decent that he has heard the word ‘no’ so much it has become background noise. Keep your arms at your sides or folded on your chest – if any of this is news to you, you don’t have the moves or the dog sense to do anything useful with them and if the dog is super-excited and mouthy you increase the chances of injury. If you just have to bump, hip-check the dog – turning your back can be just as effective.
That is all.
I made a YouToob!
My Panther Chameleon (Furcifer pardalis) chowing down on a couple male Orange Spotted Roaches (Blaptica dubia). Bollywood, here I come!
A serious thunderstorm came through early yesterday evening – there was even a tornado warning issued (not common here in New England)! No funnel clouds AFAIK, but about 10 minutes of hail. Some pictures of the aftermath taken this morning…
I grabbed one of the larger stones and put it in the freezer:
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My lotus took some hits:
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It’s a tough life. A nestling killed by the hail:
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The woods got a much needed soaking – out come the amphibians. Young of the year spring peepers everywhere:
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Make your own gas station sign here – via Bruce Sterling, who also gives us a link to an article in the Australian:
There is instead a new reality: the greatest transfer of income in human history, away from energy importers such as the US to energy exporters; the rise of a new breed of wealthy autocracies that cripple US hopes of dominating the global system; and demands on the US to make fresh compromises in a world where power is rapidly being diversified.
Despite cyclical fluctuations, world oil and energy prices will stay high, driven by long-run changes in supply and demand. This provokes a global wealth redistribution without precedent to oil exporters, mainly in the Middle East and Russia, that marches in tandem with China’s export-driven current account surplus.
