So, six months after I adopted a catastrophe of cacti from my friend Brian, the final culling has been completed and the survivors are lookin’ mighty hearty:
These aren’t all that’s left out of the 45 or so plants that I took in, but only about a third of them made it -- they were in bad shape to start with, and I knew that many of them would die.
(Technorati tags: plantblogging)
I hadn’t been in a comic book store for years and years, but I was with my brother, who is a serious collector, recently and we popped into Fourth World Comics on Long Island, which had been one of our two go-to places for a geek fix when we were kids. (The other place has long since gone out of business, but that’s where I met my longtime fan acquaintance Glenn Hauman: he used to work there. Glenn is now hip-deep in the mysterious ComicMix, about which I am sworn to secrecy. Yes, it’s the Vast Geek Conspiracy at work...)
As I was wandering the hallowed aisles of Fourth World, I was sent tumbling back to my childhood, when I could be lost for hours in those deliciously oversized British magazines about science fiction -- Dalek pinups! -- and dice with too many sides and strange toys from Japan. And then this caught my eye:
And I was in love.
I’m at the science fiction convention Boskone, in Boston, this weekend, Friday through Sunday. Most of my panels are on Saturday, so if you can only attend one day and would like to say hello, that’d be the day to stop by.
My con roommate -- my friend, artist and writer Bonnie-Ann Black -- and I will be hosting a room party on Saturday night. Look for flyers around the hotel announcing the Bronx Babes' Traveling Creative Salon -- that’ll be us.
Of course, the hotel bar is always a good place to look for me, too.
Hope to see you in Boston!
PANELS:
I saw the film The Astronaut Farmer yesterday -- wonderful, and wonderfully geeky film: see it when it opens next week. It’s about a Texas rancher, played by Billy Bob Thornton, who’s building a rocket in his barn, which isn’t so farfetched: he was an aerospace engineer and astronaut-in-training before he was a rancher, so he knows what he’s doing. And the film me thinking about the Virgin Earth initiative I wrote about yesterday -- I’d posted that just before I ran into the movie, so I guess it was fresh in my mind.
It occurred to me that it is perhaps just as likely that an individual could win the Virgin Earth prize, for coming up with the technology to scrub greenhouse gases from the Earth’s atmosphere. There’s a long American tradition of technological breakthroughs or new products coming from garage scientists -- see: Apple Computer, for one. And we’re certainly NOT seeing innovative thinking coming out of corporate or governmental arenas. As reported on Monday:
Now this is exciting. This is forward-thinking. Al Gore and Richard Branson have teamed up to announce a prize of $25 million for whoever comes up with a viable way to scrub CO2 and other greenhouse gases from the atmosphere. At the initiative’s Web site, Virgin Earth, they liken the contest to the one the British government sponsored in the 18th century to solve the longitude problem, which drove innovation in timekeeping and navigation, and by extension, trade and travel. It’s probably not too much of a stretch to say that solving the longitude changed the world in the 18th century in the same way that kicking global warming in the butt will do in the 21st.
Oh, er. It turns out that Danger Mouse is actually half of the group Gnarls Barkley, and an in-demand producer in his own right (according to CNN).
Does he know he’s named after a cartoon character?
(Technorati tags: Danger Mouse, Gnarls Barkley, Grammy Awards)
No, not really. That would be news, though...
(Technorati tags: Anna Nicole Smith)
Why not? Hey, you may be the father of Anna Nicole Smith’s baby -- how do you know you’re not? If Zsa Zsa Gabor’s husband could be the baby’s father, so could you.
In other news, the mainstream media continues to fail to understand the revolting-peasants importance of bloggers. I don’t mean that categorization to be derogatory -- I mean it to indicate a role as revolutionaries bringing down the hegmony of the corporate media.
Get this: Reuters today had the gall to call the bloggish outrage over the nonstop cable-news coverage of the death of a Playboy bunny as “pseudonymous savagery [that] passes for informed commentary on the Web,” while stating that this “cruelty contrasted with the tone of respectful shock used in blanket coverage of her death on cable television.”
Oh my god the hours -- hours, I tell ya -- that I waste looking at funny pictures of cats I’ve never even met. And also hours I spend cleaning up liquid spewed over the keyboard.
My favorite:
And a close second:
It’s the cleverness of geeks that gets me: the wordplay and the self-deprecation involved in the captions and the sheer adoration of kitties. Dogs would be no fun. Dogs would be like, “You took my picture? Cool! Let’s post it online!” And cats are like, “Talk to my agent. I want residuals.” Cats are fun to tease. And I think geeks are jealous of cats: who wouldn’t like to spend their day sleeping and -- here’s the key point -- not feel guilty about it?
(Technorati tags: catblogging)
Speaking of the complete irrelevance of the mainstream media to anything that matters...
NBC is still trying to woo us bloggers. Today they’re asking us to join a service called BlogBurst, which takes our full-content RSS feeds and turns around and sells them to corporate outfits.
No kidding. Cuz the cubicle-surfers haven’t got an inkling of a clue on how to harness full-content RSS feeds themselves. Honestly.
How does BlogBurst work? It’s brilliant in its evil:
Are they kidding? Seriously. Are. They. Fucking. Kidding? Top story of the night:
I bought a new pin recently for my bag -- the one I haul all my crap around in everyday, the way we New Yorkers do because we don’t have cars to haul all our crap around in -- because if I’m going to dress like a teenager on a day to day basis, why not go whole hog and extend the motif to my bag? The pin says, “I will not obsess, I will not obsess, I will not obsess,” which I like because, as a geek, I tend to obsess about stuff, and it tends to make me miserable as much as it helps me get all my shit done. I’m the kind of person who can fall into a habit rather quickly and then get stuck in that rut, but once I decide to shuck that habit, I can... and then I find something new to obsess about.
The New York Post picks up on the debacle of the NYC blogger summit I attended last week:
Jeff Zucker, who's set to take over as CEO of NBC Universal to tackle the challenges the Internet poses to TV land, might want to dole out some advice to his underlings at WNBC-TV.The local New York TV station hosted more than 130 bloggers at an evening event last week at NBC headquarters and ended up alienating most of them by begging them to e-mail in scoops.
Tee-hee. They really were begging. It was fairly pathetic.
(Technorati tags: blogger summit)
Geeks are so clever...
(Technorati tags: Doctor Who, Dalek, Monty Python)
So I was at this “blogger summit” hosted by WNBC (the local NBC affiliate) here in NYC on Wednesday night. I figured it’d be a chance for a free drink and some free food and networking with other members of the rising hegemony of alternative noncorporate media types. It was only once I actually arrived at NBC Studios at 30 Rockefeller Center -- aka GE’s evil urban lair -- and met up with some blogging friends and we all started wondering just why the hell NBC had called us all together that I started to get a hinky feeling.
Also: it turned out there was no booze. That’s never a good sign.
My buddy Gabriel Shanks of Modern Fabulosity has the lowdown -- honestly, he says absolutely everything I wanted to say about this ridiculous shindig, so there’s no need to repeat it: just go read his reaction to the event. Then come back here.
If people are so upset about this:
...how upset are they gonna be when Rowling lets Harry have sex before she kills him off in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows? Not that I have any inside information or anything, but it would only be fair, wouldn’t it?
Meanwhile, the British paper The Herald has a piece in its February 3rd issue about the whole Harry phenomenon. There’s nothing really new in it, but I was struck for the first time by the generational issues at work in the success of Rowling’s books: she came along at just the right time, when people started caring about, you know, kids again:
I just bought this T-shirt from Raplica.com:
(It says "ATHF is the bomb.")
Though there's also this one, too, from CottonFactory.com:
(Technorati tags: Aqua Teen Hunger Force)
This is why I am frequently uninspired to catblog:
My cats are both 17 years old, and they don't do much beyond sleep anymore.
(Technorati tags: catblogging, cats)
And now we have the criminalization of geekiness. Two artists in Boston have been arrested -- arrested -- because their guerilla marketing scheme for a cartoon for adults was misinterpreted by some idiot -- by multiple corporate idiots -- as attempted terrorism.
What we have here is a failure to communicate. No, worse: we have a fundamental disconnect between disparate realms of the culture. Look, I’ve never even seen Aqua Teen Hunger Force, and still I would have recognized that the little electronic Lite-Brite thingie that panicked someone into calling the police, and panicked the police into locking down the city in order to detonate these things, was clearly just an alt-culture touchstone, or someone having a goof.
Is it me? Maybe not: the judge in the arraignment of Peter Berdovsky, 27, and Sean Stevens, 28 (note: they’re Xers), reduced their bail from $100,000 to $2,500, so perhaps already it is being recognized that this is a case of overexaggerated response on the part of the municipal authorities in Boston, not a matter of willful, concerted intent to do malice on the part of the artists.
The Washington Post is eternally clueless, though:
The light boxes portrayed "mooninites," essentially juvenile delinquents from another galaxy making an obscene gesture.
Because, you know, our moon is in “another galaxy.” Am I wrong? Does a quick Google not reveal that this character is supposed to be from our moon?
Holy shit! CNN is pixelating the image of the Lite Brite thingie that terrified the city of Boston, lest ATHF get any more free publicity out of this. Or else CNN is afraid that people will be offended to see a Lite Brite cartoon immigrant from the moon flipping the bird.
Check out AlterNet: it has video of the press conference Berdovsky and Stevens gave this afternoon, in which they accorded this issue precisely the kind of seriousness it deserves.
Oh, and P.S.: Advertising can certainly be evil, but still...
(Technorati tags: Aqua Teen Hunger Force, Boston terrorism scare)
