Joshuah Bearman

A World Withouth Garfield

In fifth grade I used to draw Garfield. Don't know why. I just did. With the help of graph paper, I got pretty good at it, copying Garfield from the many horizontally bound Garfield collections I had. Then I started doing freehand, inventing Garfield in different poses, other Garfield hijnx situations. Pretty soon girls at my school would pay me to draw Garfield for them. This was my sole leverage with girls at this time. Later it would be calculus tutoring, which would be responsible for my going to prom with the cutest valedictorian the world has ever known. But that was later. In fifth grade, the girls just wanted Garfield. I'd draw Garfield on their notebooks, on their homework, on their hands. When I got a hold of some of my father's oversize computer paper form JPL, my cottage industry moved into the big time. Soon, the girls were commissioning special edition Garfield-by-Bearman posters, one-off bootlegs for their bedrooms that, if any still survive, must surely be worth a fortune. Which means in retrospect I probably should have charged more than fifty cents.

Anyhow, all these years I though I had a lock on the secondary market of what I like to call "Interpretative Garfield." And then I saw garfieldminusgarfield. Some genius discovered that Garfield without the cat is a funny and penetrating commentary on live that Jim Davis ever intended. Example:

Full archive is here, although this seems to be a recent effort. Meanwhile, Marmaduke Explained keeps plugging on long, two-plus-years and running!

Finally Made The Tabloids

One word: Plastics

Before DDT was banned, enough of it was used that every single living organism absorbed trace amounts of the pesticide. Apparently Bisphenol A, a component of ordinary plastic, is almost as ubiquitous:

scientists analyzed urine from some 2,500 people who had been recruited between 2003 and 2004 for the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES). Roughly 92 percent of the individuals hosted measurable amounts of BPA, according to a report in the January Environmental Health Perspectives. It's the first study to measure the pollutant in a representative cross-section of the U.S. population.

What I learned in San Francisco

Energy Crisis Solved

From my pal John Silver:

We dig two holes at the grave of Kurt Cobain. One just at the head of his coffin, one at the foot. We need to get the holes right up against the coffin. Down the one at his head, we drop a speaker and play a looped copy of Dave Grohl being interviewed by Terry Gross, about his new album "Echoes, Silence, Patience & Grace" ( blech ) in which he describes his song writing process: "It’s just me sitting in front of a giant plasma screen with my guitar, watching Iron Chef, plonking out song ideas." So down the other hole we put a turbine. Then, as Kurt Cobain starts to spin, we harness the energy. I bet we could light up the Golden Gate bridge!

I he's on to something. But why stop at kurt cobain? Drop a turbine next to Jim Morrison when Ray Manzarek goes on Fresh Air and sounds like a high school theater teacher talking about how "groovy it was back in 1969." That alone could compensate for not drilling in ANWR. Spinergy Inc!

Thunder Child

Somehow I missed that there was a switched-on prog-rock musical version of War of the Worlds that spawned two international hits in 1978. Having sampled those, however, I think the true masterpiece is the lesser known Thunder Child:

Monkey Round Up

Drunkey Monkeys (Includes video, and disapproving teetotaling monkeys)

Monkeys trade hugs for baby love

English speaking bonobos

More consequences of giving capuchins a monetary economy: they developed a sense of justice

And Gorillas were discovered for the first time to have sex facing each other. The culprit, by the way, was Leah, the same gorilla seen using  tools a couple years ago. Next report: Statue of Liberty Found Buried in Sand!

Apollo

Last year, I wrote about Sundance's whirlwind of parties, credentials, hobnobbing, culminating in an emotional screening of In the Shadow of the Moon. (It makes sense in the article.) Anyhow, at the time I got this nice note about my article from an old pal. Just found it again in my inbox, and decided to share it here:

Hey Josh,

Manny here.

I just got done reading your piece on sundance. As an aging veteran of the festival, I was heartened and saddened to see things haven't changed and that you were able to see it for what it is for regular people and regular filmmakers (the regualr filmmakers being we who end up doing nothing more at sundance than drinking and eating as much free food and alcohol as possible): one big party. If I'm ever invited again, I'll make sure to book most of my time snowboarding...

I often think of and recconsider the meaning of humans having been to the moon, that it was this this country's culture that was able to put men there (Hitler had planned to kill off his rocket scientists, right? Gosh... immigrants helped put men on the moon...). I remember (I'm that old) watching the astronauts, a fuzzy image on the tv, at my grandmother's house in glassell park and not having any sense of surprise about it. Having visited mexico on and off in my short life, I'd already developed a sense of the new and old worlds:  The streets of my other grandmother's town in mexico were covered in cobblestones. Horse, mule and donkey-drawn wagons were mixed in with automobile traffic. In this country, the imagery and iconography of progress gave my young boy's existence context. In the united states we climed into jet-planes and flew to mexico where television itself seemed a miracle.

So of course americans were on the moon. Of course! Who the hell else?! Meandering to my point, when I see images of the Lunar Module, of the Saturn V, the Command Module, all of those ships have "UNITED STATES" painted on them, in a straight authoritive font, documenting exactly who is doing what, not "america" (pronouncing it like Wbush) in flowery lettering, as if to lend some philosophical sense of puropse. When i see those images, I can't help but celebrate and fear that getting on the moon was the height of this culture, that in one complex act, Amercans gave the people of the world, all of humanity, „the greatest adventure on which man has ever embarked, replete with the hope and the actual motherfucken tools to get off this planet and find another one to live on when, in a geological sense, the sun goes belly up. Could it be true that getting on the moon was the point of this country? That it's  all downhill since then? That the dark side of our culture (the forces that allow overt and clandestine wars against the weak) will lead us on a path of self-destruction? The moon may have been it, the height of whatt our culture gave the world.

Anyway, it makes me cry to think of eveything getting on the moon has meant, just how great this country and culture has in many respects, been. White American Men on the moon...I'm genuinely tickled and proud. I once visited friend of mine in Ohio and I told him I wanted to sneak onto the OSU campus and find the engineering class Neal Armstrong used to teach. He laughed. He then proceeded to tell me about the time his family took a skit trip with family friends. It ended up that because of school and work schedules, he, as a ten year old, would have to drive up  with the other family's dad. Four hours on the road, just the two of them...the other dad? Neal Armstrong...

It's nice seeing your byline.

take care
manny

Global Cooling

Just when we get our Prius, they come out with the quick fix:

 Giving Earth an Umbrella

By Eli Kintisch
ScienceNOW Daily News
22 February 2008

Spraying millions of metric tons of sulfate particles into the atmosphere could reverse some human-caused global warming, a new study shows. But the simulations also reveal that the technique, which mimics the short-term cooling effects of volcanic eruptions, could chill the planet if overdone.

Alarmed by the lack of progress by governments in finding ways to slow emissions of CO₂, climate researchers have begun to examine so-called geoengineering schemes (ScienceNOW, 9 November 2007). One method involves injecting large amounts of sulfate particles into the upper atmosphere. Like the particles emitted during volcanic eruptions, sulfate aerosols cool the Earth by blocking a portion of the sun's rays. Previous studies of how such a scheme would lower Earth's temperature used back-of-the-envelope calculations. Instead of simulating the behavior of aerosols, researchers have turned down the intensity of the sun manually in their models.

  In the new work, published in Geophysical Research Letters late last month, researchers modified an established climate model to gauge the effects of varying aerosol amount and size. The findings confirmed the previous rough estimates that releasing large amounts of sulfates can reverse some impacts of higher carbon emissions. For example, in a simulated world where the atmospheric CO₂ levels were double today's values--a scenario many scientists believe likely--models predict that Earth will warm by more than 2°C. Adding a million metric tons a year of smaller sulfate aerosols to the stratosphere reduced that increase to 1°C and forestalled some predicted effects on precipitation, including more rain in the Southern Ocean and along the equator. "Geoengineering pushes the climate more towards a climate that looks like today's," says atmospheric scientist Philip Rasch of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, which conducted the study.

But the models also suggest that the scheme could go too far: Adding excess sulfur could increase ice in Antarctica, "overcompensating" for warming, says Rasch, which could affect ecosystems and the global ocean-atmosphere system in a myriad of ways that scientists haven't studied.

Climate modeler Christopher Bretherton of the University of Washington, Seattle, called the study "good, solid, important work … [suggesting] stratospheric aerosol injection is an approach to compensate greenhouse warming that is worthy of further study." However, other researchers see limitations. If nations begin to geoengineer using aerosols, says climate researcher Michael MacCracken of the Climate Institute in Washington D.C., the aerosols would likely be emitted in certain spots across the globe, not spread equally through the atmosphere, as occurred in models the scientists used. Uneven distribution of the aerosols could lead to more cooling in some places than in others, which could cause unknown environmental consequences.

In addition, the study doesn't address larger concerns about geoengineering, says climate modeler Raymond Pierrehumbert of the University of Chicago in Illinois. He says that global temperatures could soar if scientists stopped geoengineering. He also worries that the use of the technique might encourage nations to continue emitting carbon dioxide "essentially into perpetuity."

Gay Bombs

From Oddee, my new favorite website:

"Gay bomb" is an informal name for a theoretical non-lethal chemical weapon, which a United States Air Force research laboratory speculated about producing.

In 1994 the Wright Laboratory in Ohio produced a three-page proposal of a variety of possible nonlethal chemical weapons, which was later obtained—complete with marginal jottings and typos—by the Sunshine Project through a Freedom of Information Act request. In one sentence of the document it was suggested that a strong aphrodisiac could be dropped on enemy troops, ideally one which would also cause "homosexual behavior". The aphrodisiac weapon was described as "distasteful but completely non-lethal". In its "New Discoveries Needed" section, the document implicitly acknowledges that no such chemicals are actually known.

That's just one of 9 "absolutely insane" experimental weapons, which also included tying cats to bombs, sending suicide dogs wired with explosives underneath tanks, and the Who Me? bomb, a fart-based weapon briefly employed during World War II.

Other lists include: Extinct animals (missing the Elephant Bird!); Strange scientific papers (including "Farting as Protection Against Unspeakable Dread," about a retarded boy who surrounded himself with a cloud of noxious fumes when feeling threatened); and some crazy personal ads which includes the following: