Joshuah Bearman

@MayorEmanuel victory poetry

So great, esp. when sequenced properly (i.e. not on Twitter):

Picked up Carl the Intern at Lane Tech, after his mathletes practice. Carl's first words: "There's not much time left." Motherf*ck...We're driving down Elston when, all of a f*cking sudden Axelrod's radio starts working. It's playing that f*cking Journey song!...And we've pulled the Civic over, turned up "Separate Ways," and we're f*cking dancing out here on the motherf*cking streets!...F*CK YOU, YOU MOTHERF*CKING TIME VORTEX. I F*CKING LOVE DANCING WITH MY FRIENDS...And then the sky f*cking opens up on us, and there's chunks of ice flying down. And it's pretty clear that the party's over...And I can see myself starting to fade out, and I hear Axelrod whispering the f*cking Kaddish quietly to himself, tears streaming...And that song's still playing from the car radio, on a never-f*cking ending loop from hell...Carl the Intern can't even make eye contact, but he's reaching out, and I touch his hand. And he says, "I love you," and I say "I know."...Quaxelrod flies over, and dips his little head, touching my fading shoe. Hambone just curls softly between my invisible legs...I can see a thousand f*cking skylines, and they are all as motherf*cking glorious as the first, and I can feel the touch of my friends...And now all I can hear is that music, and suddenly everything just f*cking...

 

What it really looks like to speed past a celestial object

Fly-by of Tempel 1, just like in the movies!

But what do you really think?

I like reading how much the New York Times does not like the Spiderman of Broadway.

Most incredible detail about arms-dealing Bond villain, Viktor Bout

From this great story in Der Spiegel is that long after Bout was pegged as an international criminal for supplying weapons to almost every conflict on the planet, he was hired by US Government to supply US Forces in Iraq! Just in case you might still be wondering whether post-invasion Iraq was just you're run-of-the mill massive fiasco, or a full-on incompetent (and crony-enriching) clusterfuck, don't forget that the earmarks Republicans are wagging their sanctimonious fingers about is about the same amount of money not just spent but totally lost in Iraq. As for the money that can be accounted for, one stellar example of Iraq-style good governance is funneling money to a criminal organization through Cheney's former company: 

Reporters Farah and Braun later discovered that Irbis completed at least 1,000 flights to Iraq in 2003 and 2004. They write: “U.S. taxpayers donated as much as $60 million to the Viktor Bout organization.” At a time when President Bush was demanding that the US’s allies be “either with us or against us” in the war on terror, the Russian arms dealer was accomplishing a balancing act. He was both a hunted man and a subcontractor to a US defense contractor.

Bout, in case you missed it, has since been arrested in Thailand and extradited to the United States to stand trial for terrorism. 

The Incomparable Grace of Print

Portugal has a new, staple-stitched, full-color, full-bleed newspaper that was just voted the best designed paper in the world: 

Apparently it is possible to launch an exciting, new newspaper, both in form and content. From the judges:

Its magazine-like size allows the reader to hold the newspaper close; the format invites the reader to engage more deeply. The publication is packed with information, yet extremely well organized, using elements of layering and editing to draw readers into every page.

i walks the line between newspaper and magazine with perfect balance. Its format supports the kind of flexibility that lets it focus on hard news one day and features the next. The editions we saw featured a lead story about a great author one day, then strong reporting of the Haiti earthquake the next. We encountered stories told with a sense of urgency and newsiness, and others told with subtlety and humor.

The paper delivers traditional newspaper content with new, engaging presentation.

Huh. Maybe someone should try that stateside? Nah! After all, that takes some vision/chutzpah/freedom from 20% shareholder returns. And god forbid that a failing, increasingly irrelevant paper with nothing to lose -- I'm not talking about the LA Times; OK maybe I am -- might try to do something bold, in the vein of a Portugese upstart called i! But you know the old adage: if it is broke, I guess we can't fix it! 

And while you're lamenting the myopia of local rags, don't miss i's gallery of stunning covers.

Naturalists' deaths by Unnatural Causes

Richard Conniff, author of the Species Seekers, found himself, while researching that book, cataloging the strange deaths of many naturalists over the past two centuries. He compiled them on his website. It makes for fascinating reading. Among my favorites:

Biermann, Adolph (?–1880), curator of the Calcutta Botanical Garden, sur­vived attack by tiger while walking in garden but succumbed a year later, age unknown, to cholera.

Brown, Kirsty M. (1974-2003), marine biologist with the British Antarctic Survey, drowned, age 29, when attacked while snorkeling and dragged 200 feet underwater by a leopard seal.

Macklot, Heinrich (1799–1832), naturalist, was so enraged when insurgents burned down his house, with all of his collections, that he organized a revenge attack and was speared to death, age 33, in Java.

Nevermann. William Heinrich (1881-1938), entomologist, killed, age 57, while hunting ants by lantern with a colleague at night in Costa Rica. He was shot by a neighbor who thought the lights of the two lanterns were the eyes of a puma.

Ruspoli, Prince  Eugenio (1866-1893), Italian explorer, gave his name to one of world’s most beautiful and rare birds, the Ethiopian endemic Prince Ruspoli’s Turaco, whose first specimen was found in the prince’s hunting bag after he was trampled to death, age 27, by an angry elephant.

 

Bush's True Voice, Nailed

By my pal Stephen Sherrill for GQ: Bush's Book Proposal. Read it and snort. Favorite line, out of context: "Are you saying I have some Pirate's Booty on me?"

It's Bullfrog Snack Attack Time

Because the Crazy Nastyass Honey Badger is just not enough: 

The Great Gatsby, in 16-bits

According to this, there was an unreleased Nintendo NES game version of The Great Gatsby, called "Doki Doki Toshokan: Gatsby no Monogatari." You play Nick Carraway, and start off at Gatsby's party, avoiding butlers and flappers while grabbing Martinis and stopping in to observe the famously fake books in Gatsby's library:

 
Weird, yes? The cartridge was discovered at a yard sale -- the electronic version of finding an original copy of the constitution behind a painting of dogs playing poker. Which makes the game's provenance suspect, in some people's book. Either way: arch art project or oddly conceived game, it's still intriguing to play, as the side scroller has established itself as an unlikely mode of re-hashing of classics from other media.

The Star Chamber of Commerce

I like this ongoing drama about a cyberwar between Anonymous and the Chamber of Commerce, which was apparently developing a sub rosa counterintelligence plan to thwart its critics, such as ChamberWatch, according to leaked documents:

Several of the documents focus on ChamberWatch, a union-backed organization that criticizes the business lobby and many of its members. The documents include personal details about activists who work for the group and suggestions for targeting its reputation, including planting fake documents, tying the organization to radical activists or creating "fake insider personas" on social media. 

The name for this program? Team Themis. I guess conspiratorial operators are required to pick enigmatic, sinister-sounding names for themselves? Maybe it helps morale while working in the shadows.  

Want to hop on this dog's back and ride into the clouds in search of the Never Ending Story? Me too!

I saw this muppet-looking dude at OK: 

Trying to decide if I'm going to see The Howling III: The Marsupials tonight

Boogie Nights, Polish-Style!

Rad, right? This is not a constructivist design for a social realism exhortation of the proletariat from 1933; it's how the Bard of the Valley's masterpiece about American pornagraphy was advertised in 1997. In Poland, where they know when to hold on to a great artistic tradition. There are many more such posters, such as this one, for Raiders of the Lost Ark:

It's the designer when into my six-year-old mind and visually represented of exactly how I would see (and did see) the movie! And how about Casablanca, as Lichtenstein (before Lichtenstein was Lichtenstein): 

Should we clone neanderthals?

Asks Archaeology magazine. The answer, self-evidently, is no: 

This real response from the real articles sounds like the plot of a different movie:

Bernard Rollin, a bioethicist and professor of philosophy at Colorado State University, doesn't believe that creating a Neanderthal clone would be an ethical problem in and of itself. The problem lies in how that individual would be treated by others. "I don't think it is fair to put people...into a circumstance where they are going to be mocked and possibly feared," he says, "and this is equally important, it's not going to have a peer group. Given that humans are at some level social beings, it would be grossly unfair." The sentiment was echoed by Stringer, "You would be bringing this Neanderthal back into a world it did not belong to....It doesn't have its home environment anymore." 
 

The Crazy Nastyass Honey Badger

Not satisfied with the police sketch of you?

If you're like me, you want to be dapper, stylish, and self-assured, even when you're on the run for stealing popsicles from the local Publix. It's a dignifed crime, after all, and it demands a dignified police sketch. So what do you do when your local department's illustrator is just not up to the task, or mildly retarded, and the pictures of you at the post office wind up looking like:  

 

 

I don't know which is worse -- the vampiric small-pox afflicted Steve Buscemi, or Mr. Hairclub For Men With No Eyes. (Apparently, Gort has been spreading his alien message through petty crime in Thailand.) And by the way, how is this supposed to work up any leads: 

A pathetic showing, right? How are you supposed to be a dashing fugitive with no fucking face? Well, fellow desperados, the days of being at the mercy of failed children's book illustrators are over. Witness the flash-based online highly customizable Face Generator! Now you can make your own police sketch and get it out there yourself, like I did:

OK, so maybe that doesn't look like me at all. And maybe it's harder to use the Face Flash than one imagines. But resembling a philosophy major at Oberlin is better than looking this dude:

Right?

P.s. This jovial-looking-apparently-foul-mouthed criminal broke into the wrong house.

Just two guys sharing a lovely moment with bumblebee

More than meets the eye!

There Will Be Disco!

South Sudan is a newly minted country. (Yay!) What's Item One on the agenda for a nascent oil-rich nation? Disco! From my favorite graf in the Times today:

In Juba the day was met with jubilation. “This is what people have been expecting, and longed for, and have achieved it,” said Aleu Garang Aleu, a spokesman for the southern referendum bureau. “People will party. There will be disco. There will be dances. People are warming up for the celebration now.

Playing the subways like an instrument

Nifty!

Who doesn't wanna dance with somebody?

This feels like the triumphant culminating scene in a Groundhog Day-type sequence where this dude has been dancing this dance hundreds of times and at first he was a wall flower but now he has it memorized and cuts looks like nobody's business, finally winning over his ladyfriend (who, by the way, somehow managed to PULL A CANDLE out of nowhere during the line in the chorus: "I wanna feel the heat with somebody!"):

The Most Illegal Wrestling Move Ever

"How are we not hypnotized?"

You want the moon, Mary?

Remember the lunar eclipse that recently coincided with last year's Winter Solstice? First time that happened since 1638, they said. Although the Washington Post, incredibly, did feel it was necessary to relate that a Wiccan priest named Starhawk disagreed with the U.S. Naval Observatory and claim the last occurrence was some time earlier. Either way, what everyone missed was that the views of the eclipsed satellite, form certain angles, in certain places, looked like it might also be pointing the way to some kind of Indiana Jones treasure:

Glowing red even! Spooky. Lovely. No wonder the beguiling Selene makes people do crazy things. 

The Last Days of W

A photographic series by Alex Soth.

Inception's Limbo -- Level 4, right? -- turns out to be just off the coast of Japan

I liked Inception. A lot. Except for the G.I. Joe/Her Majesty's Secret Service/Golden Eye (the game) snow level. And I could have done with less gun play in general. And why didn't Ariadne just change the walls of the snow fortress so they could get the combination? Or make a hill rise from the snow to block the bad guys on their snowmobiles? And by the way, weren't they supposed to spend like three weeks or something at the snow fortress if you follow the math they laid out earlier? That's a lot of time to get into the safe. What were they supposed to do the rest of the time?

But that's not the point of the movie. If you start trying to unravel the mechanics, you're missing the point. Just leave the loose threads alone and you will still be wearing and appreciating the embroidered beauty of a handsome sweater! It's a sweater than I enjoyed, and not only because I am obsessed with dreams, especially my own. I liked that the architect was name Ariadne, which many people thought was Oh So Obvious, although they couldn't put their finger on why exactly. (Ariadne is mostly known as Theseus' savior against the labyrinth and the minotaur, which relates to the film, although I initially thought of the figure of Sleeping Ariadne, which is traditionally interpreted as being a portrait of hypnopompic/hypnogagic confusion. And by the way, if you're looking for obvious, how about mannered Morpheus [hello, Greek dream deity!] with his red and blue pills [duh!] of The Matrix.)

Indeed: I hated The Matrix. Inception was sort of like The Matrix, but good. A real movie, that is, with some real, non-sci-fi themes. I really appreciated some of the broad ideas that emerged from Inception: the frailty of memory; how falling in love feels like it lasts forever; how Leonardo's interior version of his dead wife became his antagonist because he could only remember her through his own guilt; how the gnostic vision of reality as an illusion can be lethal.

Or is it? Any movie that can inspire the teenage girls who run the dressing room at Forever 21 -- where, yes, I was trying on some items; SECRET TIP: F21 has some nice, cheap basics for guys -- to parse various personal theories of reality is alright by me. I'm very glad Inception was nominated for an academy award, alongside a surprising strong group of non-blockbuster films. I guess it is a good movie year after all, despite that Steve Elliott is totally pissed off that Blue Valentine was overlooked. But none of this is the point of bringing up Inception. What made me think of the film again was that I discovered these images of Battleship Island, a once-dense but abandoned small city in the Sea of Japan that happens to look a lot like Level 4:

Many more pictures here, at one of my favorites: Dark Roasted Blend. 

This should be funnier than it is

Movies I don't remember. Although the entry for Critters 2 can't help but amuse, and includes the compelling marketing factoid that when the movie came out there was a number you could call and listen to scenes from it on the phone!

The Ponzi State from above

Florida has had the makings of a real estate scam since Ponce de Leon decided that the peninsula's vast swamp concealed the Fountain of Youth. St. Augustine boosters at the turn of the previous century made it worse when they embellished stories about said explorer and his fountain to lure visitors from up north. Since then, Florida has gone through many real estate booms and busts, the latest cycle being the most dramatic. Paul Reyes expertly describes Florida's current real estate nadir in the pages of Harper's as he works on a clean-up crew of foreclosed houses -- "trashing them out," as its known in the industry argot -- alongside his father, who, as it happens, was suckered into buying a piece of swamp to one day build his own Sunshine State ranchette decades ago. Reyes goes to the plot eventually; it still stands empty, like so much of Florida, which is what George Packer cataloged for the New Yorker a year or two ago when he coined (for me anyhow) the term, the Ponzi State, in the hed of a great piece (not online, alas) in which he just wandered through neighborhoods full of empty houses, drove streets that were never finished, discovered suburban ghost towns with only one survivor, holding a yard sale with no takers to sell family heirlooms in order to keep a valueless stucco box. It is an incredible portrait. But misery on the ground can look like something else from the air, as evidenced by these aerial frames, gleaned from Google Earth, of the strangely intriguing geometry of Florida's calamitous development: 

Many more such landscapes here.

And by the way: Who needs artists when you have Google Earth/Street View?   

Mars Candy appropriately titled, as scientists discover marshmallow planet with candy center

Johannes Kepler described the path of planets in the 16th century, and today his namesake deep space telescope Kepler found more than a 1,000 planets, many of them earth-sized, in habitable zones, possibly with water, and therefore alien life. But who cares about that when apparently another whole section of the universe is made of sweets? The key graf in the story about a new category of celestial discovery: 

The[se] planets have such low masses that the outer density of each is sort of like a marshmallow, while their cores are "probably like hard candy," he said.

Don't let the Hansel8200 and Greteltron ships near those quadrants!