Gould Effect

l have a new favorite food: gourmet french fries with truffle oil. Courtesy of the new Baguette Box. I also knew next to nothing about the history of the truffle.

Last night I had a very vivid dream for the first time in months. I was shopping at a type of open air market for hats and there was a scientist-type in a smock standing over an empty table. He had a machine to one side. I ask him what he's selling and he says - "Sun hats". Apparently, the machine can transport hats made out material from the surface of the sun, collected by some space probe and beamed direct to us. I didn't believe him. So he turned the machine on and it beeped and whirred and a hat just appears on the table. It looked like a woman's hat from the 20s, very ornate, and it was very beautiful. I was so surprised and excited. I felt the hat, and it felt a little bit...off...stiff in some unnatural way, just enough to make me believe that it was made out of some exotic substance. Sun stuff. But transformed so as to be safe to the touch. When he saw how happy I was, he made a few more hats appear, and I just stood there dumbfounded, trying to decide which sun hat to buy.

This site rides the boundary between dynamic and static in just the right way. But surely, progress demands a picture per second eventually?

Austin transmission - SXSW 2005 - The river is green, the black ravens are loud, the rock is stunningly mediocre, the people are drunk. Every business is a bar. With BBQ sauce. The sets are short to make room for over 1,000 bands across three dozen venues. Every venue, every hour, a new band, starting at lunch, ending after 2 AM. My earplugs are shredded.

Most horror movies bore me. The Ring was an exception, so I'm looking forward to the opening of The Ring 2 this week. Maybe the girl lives in the uncanny valley?

Today we are thinking about album covers for the four new bands coming on Wax Orchard. First, we have reviewed the worst album covers of all time. Ahhhhh.
So bad it's good. Next, we turn to one of the best genres ever to come along for the album cover designer: funk.

I had an idea last summer related to flashmobs. While the media frenzy has subsided, they still are going here and there around the world, but so far, I haven't heard of anybody using the term to organize trading of physical stuff. I see no reason why there can't be a physical version of P2P at the city level.

I finished Tony Smith's memorial site!! More than two years in the making, since he passed away accidentally from some inexplicable cocktail of prescription drugs and alcohol. This is the longest project of my life, and the most draining, but also very rewarding.

I'm fairly jaded about future technologies. The future is now, slashdot, wired, blah blah blah. But this made me pause for just a second. Eventually warfare will be a video game fought with machines.

Do you think bunnies are cute? http://savetoby.com/

Can empathy, in excess, be a vice?

Saved message, Friday, Feb. 4th, 9:37 PM:

Once upon a time, there was a very territorial cow, who lived on a plot of land.
He would scare off any other animal that ever tried to get on *his* plot of grass. Mooing fiercely at them - any animal who tried, human, wildebeast, dogs, anything!
He would moo at them and say, "MOOO! This is my territory, get the fuck off."
But in the middle of this plot of land, a little ant lived in the grass, but the cow never knew.