August 11, 2008
Architecture
we shall begin by studying Temples. did it ever occur to you that there is only one type of building: the Temple?
Of course, there are different kinds of Temples -- Bacchus wants a different kind of place than Athena does. But every building is the house of a certain god.
Back before Tower Records collapsed under the internet, I went in there one time. The people working there do not care what kind of music you want, but they will move mountains to find it for you. They regarded themselves as priests and priestesses of Pan. The mall is a Pantheon, a temple to all the gods. And we worship there, leaving our offerings and gratefully accepting what the gods will give us.
The successful Architect is a good sherpa, conducting the client to the peak of their chosen mountain. Then coming down and doing it again.
Posted by matthew at 12:51 AM | Comments (0)
August 03, 2008
leonard schlain call your office
Posted by matthew at 02:44 PM | Comments (0)
August 02, 2008
season
what with the total eclipse of the sun, we've been busy up here lately. Mrs. Briggs enjoyed a tranquil day with the cats.
a very interesting article caught my eye this evening: likelihood is strong that the tale is emblematic of the age, it has all the elements.
how could it be otherwise when "It could not immediately be determined if the loss of key executives would alter that timetable." is how the article concludes (referring to the casino).
As an aside, seriously... you would be hard pressed to identify a single time in the course of human history when "the loss of key executives would alter that timetable." No disrepect intended. To the clock.
there's always good news, even for you.
even for me.
Posted by matthew at 03:45 AM | Comments (0)
June 17, 2008
click this
suggested visit: drunkmenworkhere.org
Posted by matthew at 02:49 PM | Comments (0)
November 02, 2007
have a fine time
get it?
Posted by matthew at 06:03 PM | Comments (3)
October 30, 2007
recommends
"Brijit aggregates the world's best long-form content and abstracts it in 100 words or less."
Posted by matthew at 10:50 PM | Comments (1)
October 11, 2007
dreams
are you responsible for your dreams? ...or for chasing them?
Posted by matthew at 08:34 PM | Comments (1)
August 04, 2007
think again
this is interesting... if you're a person who's concerned about global warming.
Posted by matthew at 03:13 PM | Comments (2)
June 30, 2007
just go
Posted by matthew at 12:13 AM | Comments (0)
June 13, 2007
NASCAR complexities
and I don't believe for one minute that the races are fixed. No way..
Posted by matthew at 12:00 AM | Comments (0)
May 28, 2007
memorial day
“Good Riddance Attention Whore”
by Cindy Sheehan
Mon May 28, 2007
I have endured a lot of smear and hatred since Casey was killed and especially since I became the so-called “Face” of the American anti-war movement. Especially since I renounced any tie I have remaining with the Democratic Party, I have been further trashed on such “liberal blogs” as the Democratic Underground. Being called an “attention whore” and being told “good riddance” are some of the more milder rebukes.
I have come to some heartbreaking conclusions this Memorial Day Morning. These are not spur of the moment reflections, but things I have been meditating on for about a year now. The conclusions that I have slowly and very reluctantly come to are very heartbreaking to me.
The first conclusion is that I was the darling of the so-called left as long as I limited my protests to George Bush and the Republican Party. Of course, I was slandered and libeled by the right as a “tool” of the Democratic Party. This label was to marginalize me and my message. How could a woman have an original thought, or be working outside of our “two-party” system?
However, when I started to hold the Democratic Party to the same standards that I held the Republican Party, support for my cause started to erode and the “left” started labeling me with the same slurs that the right used. I guess no one paid attention to me when I said that the issue of peace and people dying for no reason is not a matter of “right or left”, but “right and wrong.”
I am deemed a radical because I believe that partisan politics should be left to the wayside when hundreds of thousands of people are dying for a war based on lies that is supported by Democrats and Republican alike. It amazes me that people who are sharp on the issues and can zero in like a laser beam on lies, misrepresentations, and political expediency when it comes to one party refuse to recognize it in their own party. Blind party loyalty is dangerous whatever side it occurs on. People of the world look on us Americans as jokes because we allow our political leaders so much murderous latitude and if we don’t find alternatives to this corrupt “two” party system our Representative Republic will die and be replaced with what we are rapidly descending into with nary a check or balance: a fascist corporate wasteland. I am demonized because I don’t see party affiliation or nationality when I look at a person, I see that person’s heart. If someone looks, dresses, acts, talks and votes like a Republican, then why do they deserve support just because he/she calls him/herself a Democrat?
I have also reached the conclusion that if I am doing what I am doing because I am an “attention whore” then I really need to be committed. I have invested everything I have into trying to bring peace with justice to a country that wants neither. If an individual wants both, then normally he/she is not willing to do more than walk in a protest march or sit behind his/her computer criticizing others. I have spent every available cent I got from the money a “grateful” country gave me when they killed my son and every penny that I have received in speaking or book fees since then. I have sacrificed a 29 year marriage and have traveled for extended periods of time away from Casey’s brother and sisters and my health has suffered and my hospital bills from last summer (when I almost died) are in collection because I have used all my energy trying to stop this country from slaughtering innocent human beings. I have been called every despicable name that small minds can think of and have had my life threatened many times.
The most devastating conclusion that I reached this morning, however, was that Casey did indeed die for nothing. His precious lifeblood drained out in a country far away from his family who loves him, killed by his own country which is beholden to and run by a war machine that even controls what we think. I have tried every since he died to make his sacrifice meaningful. Casey died for a country which cares more about who will be the next American Idol than how many people will be killed in the next few months while Democrats and Republicans play politics with human lives. It is so painful to me to know that I bought into this system for so many years and Casey paid the price for that allegiance. I failed my boy and that hurts the most.
I have also tried to work within a peace movement that often puts personal egos above peace and human life. This group won’t work with that group; he won’t attend an event if she is going to be there; and why does Cindy Sheehan get all the attention anyway? It is hard to work for peace when the very movement that is named after it has so many divisions.
Our brave young men and women in Iraq have been abandoned there indefinitely by their cowardly leaders who move them around like pawns on a chessboard of destruction and the people of Iraq have been doomed to death and fates worse than death by people worried more about elections than people. However, in five, ten, or fifteen years, our troops will come limping home in another abject defeat and ten or twenty years from then, our children’s children will be seeing their loved ones die for no reason, because their grandparents also bought into this corrupt system. George Bush will never be impeached because if the Democrats dig too deeply, they may unearth a few skeletons in their own graves and the system will perpetuate itself in perpetuity.
I am going to take whatever I have left and go home. I am going to go home and be a mother to my surviving children and try to regain some of what I have lost. I will try to maintain and nurture some very positive relationships that I have found in the journey that I was forced into when Casey died and try to repair some of the ones that have fallen apart since I began this single-minded crusade to try and change a paradigm that is now, I am afraid, carved in immovable, unbendable and rigidly mendacious marble.
Camp Casey has served its purpose. It’s for sale. Anyone want to buy five beautiful acres in Crawford, Texas ? I will consider any reasonable offer. I hear George Bush will be moving out soon, too… which makes the property even more valuable.
This is my resignation letter as the “face” of the American anti-war movement. This is not my “Checkers” moment, because I will never give up trying to help people in the world who are harmed by the empire of the good old US of A, but I am finished working in, or outside of this system. This system forcefully resists being helped and eats up the people who try to help it. I am getting out before it totally consumes me or anymore people that I love and the rest of my resources.
Good-bye America… you are not the country that I love and I finally realized no matter how much I sacrifice, I can’t make you be that country unless you want it.
It’s up to you now.
Posted by matthew at 09:37 PM | Comments (0)
May 19, 2007
Dennis, dennis...
ok, i give up. how could this be a better world?
her myspace (caution: sound down... it's all yellow...)
...read the right sidebar and see if you don't agree.
Posted by matthew at 10:11 PM | Comments (0)
March 30, 2007
free air
Posted by matthew at 09:23 AM | Comments (0)
February 24, 2007
usmc
Posted by matthew at 09:05 AM | Comments (0)
February 06, 2007
paper or plastic
there are about 60 million pet dogs in the united states today.
if a dog turns dog food into a pound of poop a day,
and if 5% of the dog poop is scooped up into plastic bags,
then we're going to put (60,000,000 x 0.05 x 365 / 2000) about 550,000 tons of dog poop in plastic bags this year.
i was wondering what kind of message that sends to future generations. and what does it say about us?
Posted by matthew at 08:57 AM | Comments (0)
January 29, 2007
rhythm to the madness
A.D. 1200:
A.D. 2000:
this is progress?
Posted by matthew at 08:23 PM | Comments (1)
January 06, 2007
round eye
There's a place near here that isn't so much a place as it is the place-between-places... it's an area that you pass through to get somewhere else. In the past ten years or so the Koreans have moved in, there are stores -- whole shopping centers -- with korean-only signs, the abstract inside-outness of their letter forms glow in purple neon against the sodium orange sky at night, informing the asian initiates as to what commercial potentials lurk within but perplexing my round-eyes.
Late at night I make a visit, make a destination of a way, smooth my black car between the toyotas with opaqued windows, ride tandem with a tractor trailer delivering ice cream, watch my mirrors for the cruisers with a thin light bar on the roof turning out from the seven elevens.
It seems sometimes that the world is made of many worlds, all overlapping and interconnected; not just in space but in time as well, if you travel ten thousand miles in space you can also travel back five hundred years in time... and this Koreatown is no different -- fifteen miles away, and twenty years back... synchronicity is hard enough to maintain within your skin, never mind within your house, your city.
There's a small establishment, black glass windows with silver metal frames, black tile floor with white grout, bottles on glass shelves in front of mirrors set with television sets of all different sizes and proportions, the bartenders in short tight skirts, wearing blue-lit headset phones in their ear, give the brandy bottle to the customer to pour, serve puffed fries out of plastic jars, put a shot glass full of coffee grounds in front of the guy lighting his cigarette, dodge the matron in her below-the-knee black dress who checks the register, wait on the middle-aged men in sharkskin with a smile, stretch their necks and wipe the counter with a towel the color of charcoal, and whisper to each other as they pass.
There's another place at the other end of the shopping center, the front door leads to a hallway. On either side, behind closed doors, there are rooms with low tables surrounded by small groups of laughing people, serious. At the end of the hall is an alcove with a bar large enough to serve three with no stools, a bandstand with a keyboardist and a singer, singing to the hallway, his voice presumably piped into the little rooms. A thin man and a thinner woman lean on each other next to the stage, their eyes large and empty, they ignore their surroundings and each other. A waiter will show you out the way you came in, making pleasant conversation about the weather.
If you drive back away from the main road a block or two, you'll go past a sub shop, past a car audio place, past a pager store with a sign "cash loans on car titles," past a drug store and an insurance office (converted houses with metal awnings over the windows) you might notice a little one-story bar set back from the street. Low and dilapidated, surrounded by porches that look as though they were built out of discarded rabbit hutches, draped with christmas lights, and plastic triangular flags and pvc flag-signs that the beer companies print, it sits on a one-way street between a tiny parking lot choked with pickup trucks and an all-night pizza place. There's an oval sign like a rudder on the roof that says SUNSET GRILL.
When you read about the concept of a time-vortex, you scoff, you might think wouldn't that be neat ...and maybe a little scary... you might even wonder what it would be like if there ever could be such a thing. But they are all around us, everywhere. They just don't work quite the way you expect, the way a reasoning mind would project.
The Sunset Grill is a holdover from another time in this neighborhood, but it's not a fossil, it's alive, and the people who go there are living in the same time as you and me. The same time on the outside at least, or in the same time on one track -- but they are tapped in to another time as well. It's possible that it is a time that never was, in reality, but they share it, they create it together, and they get something from it or they do something with it that gives their lives purpose, or makes it bearable, or maybe makes it unbearable. It's tough to say and probably unnecessary.
Inside the vestibule is a cigarette machine, $4.50 a pack. If you ask her, the woman behind the bar will explain that the rule is that since the machine is in the direct view of the bartender it is allowed. About a fourth of the floor space is devoted to the stage for the band. They sit in the window, the drummer in the corner, the others squeezed in around. There are cymbals arranged along the top of the wall, signed with black markers, dented and bent, draped with tiny white lights. A four piece band can fit, and add a singer when she's sober enough to remember the words. Or not. The mixing board crowds the door, and you should learn to wait until the song ends to go in; it's just respect. There's a tiny bench with a plastic beer pitcher, usually about a third full of crumpled bills. The band will do covers. Taking Care of Business. Cocaine. Tequila Sunrise. Jumping Jack Flash. School's Out. The Boys are Back in Town. Twist and Shout. Little Pink Houses.
The drummer, the bass player, the guitarists, the singer, why are they here? They play loud, they play with the confidence of long practice, their hair is gray, long, thinning. Their bellies are thick, their faces are lined. They outnumber their audience. The bartenders ignore them and they ignore the bartenders. The owner wants them to finish, wants the night to be over, wants to count the register and go home. They play something from Aerosmith. Highway to Hell. Jack and Diane. Knocking on Heaven's Door. They dedicate that song to Saddam.
The guitar players fingers are thick. His playing isn't crisp, but he gets the job done. The drummer is a guy you'd expect to meet working behind the counter in an electrical supply warehouse, but he's playing the drums like a musical instrument. He's sweating and he's pushing the others forward, keeping them honest. When the set is over he's the only one who accepts the offer of a free drink, sipping from the plastic cup the bartender brings him and wincing, then carefully placing it down on the bench next to an empty beer bottle and going back to winding the cords and packing the microphones. Later he comes to the bar and gets change for a five. He leaves two bucks for the bartender and goes back to packing up the amp.
These people get something out of this, there's a reason they play and sing these old songs. Do they even think about it? Could they put words to an answer to the question why? There are things you do because you have to, what else would they do. The regulars sit on their stools like barnacles. Their puffy eyes watch the bartenders work the jagermeister dispenser; when they settle up they need help reading the tiny text on their tab printouts. The white in their clothes glows lavender in the blacklights that are mounted behind the beam above the bar. The bartenders have learned to be careful, very careful. Distance is the most effective shield we know.
There are two couples at a table, white guys with korean girls tonight, the guys are drinking more than the girls. They don't quite fit -- it's not that they are out of place, they are out of time. They aren't from far enough back, maybe ten years. An old man sits on a bench, his back to the wall. He has a fresh Heineken he ordered at last call. He's watching the ass of a very drunk woman as she fumbles in her purse, looking for her phone. She thinks she lost it, maybe in the parking lot, maybe in the ladies room. There's somebody in there, so she can't go and look. People tell her to call the phone but she says the ringer is on silent. The guy she's with is pissed off. The old man is trying to pretend he's not interested. A couple of bills fall from her purse onto the floor. He stops trying. Her boyfriend lets them lay there a while before he picks them up. A guy in a dark suit pays his bill, and he turns to leave, dropping a twenty on the floor. As he walks towards the door past the band who are packing their gear, somebody calls to him and picks it up. He turns and they give him the money. The old man turns to me. "I like this place," he says.
"What time do you think it is?" I ask him.
Posted by matthew at 10:28 PM | Comments (2)
April 01, 2006
loss of life
dulles airport is one of the ten busiest airports in the united states. last year slightly less that thirty million passengers went through there.
let's figure that half of them were arriving and half were leaving. so that's fifteen million.
fifteen million is a little more than 40,000 a day... almost 2,000 an hour. there are quite a few security gates, but let's assume a security gate can handle two people a minute, you'd need about 15 gates functioning at that rate to handle the passengers. now each gate is manned by three or four guards, and for argument's sake lets say there's one manager for every six guards, so that's sixty people full-time, round the clock. the real number is probably more, definitely not less. and it doesn't include the cops and tow truck drivers and people monitoring the closed circuit cameras, or the special guards who "interview" selected passengers, but never mind them...
60 people x 24 hours x 365 days = 525,600 hours spent screening.
the security check adds an average of what, twenty minutes to boarding? it's probably more, but let's call it twenty.
15,000,000 x 1/3 hour = 5,000,000 hours being screened.
5,000,000 + 525,600 = 5,525,600 hours per year spent by passengers and screeners. at dulles.
let's say an average american's life expectancy is eighty years. maybe it's more, maybe less, but we'll call it eighty.
80 years x 365 days x 24 hours = 700,800 hours life expectancy
5,525,600 hours spent ÷ 700,800 = 7.88 entire lifetimes spent screening at dulles every year.
say the total air traffic of all the airports is thirty times that of dulles... it's probably significantly more, but call it thirty, then this security consumes about 200 lives a year. a 757 has 182 seats.
of course some of the assumptions above could be off by an order of magnitude or more, on the low side.
we prefer loss of life that's spread thin like mayonaisse, rather than in bite-size chunks.
Posted by matthew at 07:09 PM | Comments (4)
February 11, 2006
chuck norris facts
just try to go here and not click on to page 2, and 3, and so on...
thanks, john!
supplemental link. Please enjoy these links responsibly.
Posted by matthew at 05:30 PM | Comments (4)
February 06, 2006
litterbugs
where do they think this thing is going to end up really?
Posted by matthew at 10:41 PM | Comments (1)
January 23, 2006
a note about the earth future to you moon people
I see so many angles, so many corners fill the streets, spill out into the woods and beaches. The fractals and twists of nature give way to helixes made of miters and folds and rhomboids. True curves and convolutions are anti-progress, and so eventually all hidden holes and trees and meandering streams and even the coastlines are replaced by fractured angularity.
The pyramids get to stay, stranded in the sands for eternity. After a hundred thousand years they still stand, though their sides gain deep erosive pits and depressions.
In time some of our art fades into the past, and millions of pictures and sculptures are put away, burned, painted over, until we see corners out of every corner of our eyes.
Small groups of people across the world protest our continued disconnection with the Earth. They advocate overthrowing the government, smashing the dams holding back the ocean, bombing the New Center of World Government, which is in the center of Colorado. It figures. Colorado is square, the most knock kneed-shaped state.
Even insects and birds and animals change by the encroachment. In time the cockroaches and ants look like boxes with legs, and birds are the color of progress, that is no color at all, nearly transparent flying critters of angles and fluttering soft feathers the shape of computer chips. In one million years the birds die, and even the cockroaches die, and their scattered remains are pin pricked and encased in smooth glass.
Square birds? I know much of this is metaphor. My mind struggles to put these odd stories into language. They start at a point deep in the pit of my stomach, rise through my chest, and I spit them out like bad medicine.
Odd stories. Odd stories. The stories are odd; they hold angles and corners and twists and turns, pieces of Earth, all pieces of me. Pieces of me. That’s what they are. Pieces of me. The unknown. The unknowable.
The stories are a spiral galaxy, the Andromeda, our own Milky Way, a barbell-shaped galaxy on the other side of the Universe, a word from afar, a place untouchable, with massive momentum and stardust. I am a space probe, sent to gather data, and my arms and legs are extensions which capture sensations and emotions and ideas and relay them to people in a sterile box, people who have to measure results, people who put conditions on my data.
I would give you cold evidence if I had it.
Posted by at 11:55 PM | Comments (3)