an old poem

An old poem that I wrote came up on the screen in front of my eyes just a few minutes ago. It is about drinking and regicide, as far as I can gather, and perhaps also the sacrifice of the fool-king in certain Northwestern European societies (Celtic, Gàidhealtachd?).

Anyhow, I made a number of key strokes, fiddled with the mouse a bit, and there it was. Now, here it is. Some editing was required. Perhaps I'll expand upon it sooner or later.

the king's head

thirsting for the sacred
streams of forgetfulness
where the mind and body
usurp the ego-king
and float on, free,
in the tannic waters,
from his bloody efforts
to conquer and to kill

It captured a moment of drunken contemplation pretty well: the self-destructive aspects of such a pastime and the happy hopefulness too. I feel inclined to have a nice cold pint right about now.

malfunction

You know Jack, it's easy to dismiss these posts without reading them but they are here to stay. Well, they are here at the moment. Okay, they appear on this back-lit screen and are stored as a mathematical equation in a machine somewhere. Heck, that makes it even easier for the purpose of these postings to be lost.

There's always an artist who claims that his or her work is driven by a desire to examine "practice". That's what these postings are, practice. It's as if I'm writing musical scales every day. Sometimes a word orphrase willput me in mind ofsomething, and a tangent carries usaway...

Alright, canijustsaythatmyspacebarisnotworkingverywellontheleftsideandi'mnotusedto
hittingitwithmyrightthumbandit'sveryannoying?!!

It's hard to make strange space-sounds with a vacuum-cleaner-trumpet suffering a broken chord!

nothing to see here, move along please

It's time to re-familiarize myself with graphic design concepts and cant. The more I put into my job, the easier it will be to make graphic design my profession. My mother would be so proud. She always said I should do graphic design. I always scoffed. Now I think she was onto something. Today I'm reading about bitmap and vector images. At work, one of our programs uses vector imaging. The Cartesian plane is a very flat place; at least, until actual real physical phenomena interfere. Infinity is a long way to stretch an object.

Not a very interesting posting today. But perhaps more interesting than nothing at all.

pure fantasy

If we were to compare our earthly location to some place close to its like on the Red planet of this solar system, we could say we are living on one of that planet's poles. I'm not entirely clear as to whether human exploration has revealed water (ice) on Mars, but either pole would be the place to look. Whatever the case, the weather of our outpost is once again like that of an arctic desert. All water is frozen! The air is dry and cold. The wind is out of the north and pierces clothing like thousands of icy needles.

Well, it has been a while since our last communication. The alien boy has been difficult to rear of late; however, he's gained even more power of persuasion through pure, innocent cuteness. This makes up for the whining, the tantrums and the tears. If I were whisked off from one part of the galaxy, had my mind reset, removed from whatever body it once had inhabited, if necessary, and placed in a new, weak, defenseless human body to start life afresh on a bizarre world, I'd be upset too.

Mormons have curious beliefs about the after-life. I recall someone telling me once that they believe we become gods over our own individual planets when we die from this world. Recently I started re-reading a collection of stories about dragons and, er, dungeons that I'd quite enjoyed in my teens. A little digging into the background of the authors revealed the Mormonic connection. Having read a certain series of books about vampires by a Mormon author it occurred to me that these people are really, truly devoted to fantasy. Escapism must be necessary within a religion that places so much emphasis on denial: both self-denial and the denial of "reality".

not enough writing time

Today won't be the day that I finish my article on the Disney film adaptation of Burroughs' Mars stories, but I will soon.

Here, have a picture. Someone else's visual interpretation of John Carter and Dejah Thoris:


 
Now it's off to draw a picture myself.

incomplete article

 http://www.johncartermovie.com/

As further proof that there is nothing new under the sun, Disney Corp. is making a movie based upon Edgar Rice Burroughs' John Carter of Mars series. Since finding out about this a few minutes ago, I have decided that this movie is going to be my guilty pleasure. I may even go to see it on opening night. It will be filmed in three dimensions, and knowing Disney, there are sure to be lots of collectible inaction figures around once the film hits the cinema. Also, it will be Pixar studio's first "live-action" project.

As a rule I support the notion that the book is always better than any movie adaptation, but this one may be "the exception that proves the rule" (I've never understood that saying, so bear with me as I try). Film-making has advanced over the past couple of decades to the point where visual wizardry now allows the viewer's imagination to take a back seat to the vision of the film-maker. Undoubtedly, this can be a problem in adaptations of written works to the big screen if the author's intent is not easily translated. For me, The Lord of the Rings movies are a great example of this.

I really love the dusty old tomes of Tolkien, and have read the Silmarillion, and even some of Christopher Tolkien's reconstruction of his father's world and the process that went into its development. I also really love what Peter Jackson did with the story. Both movie and book were labours of love that required real mastery to complete successfully. Given that, the written work is still the higher form of art-work.

Yadda-yadda, more on this next time. This may have to be an un-premeditated posting! But I like where this is going. Also, a link!

saturday morning cartoons

Another posting since I've been falling behind this month, even if I'm the only one who cares.

for your viewing pleasure

Clippity-clop.

balderdash

The body is amazing. It is a spacecraft. It is a time craft. It has a brain, a physical thing, and houses a mind, a non-corporeal being. Yet, my body carries me to certain doom. Can I fault my body for this? The set of circumstances for mortality go beyond just one body. There seems to be a school of thought these days that is focused on curing the individual body of the "disease" of mortality. Some scientists think they are coming closer to a solution. How can this be? Why should this be? Where the heck is the ethics committee?

In bygone days kings, queens, emperors, rulers attempted to immortalize themselves. Stories have come down to us, but the bodies of the people themselves are now dust. They became food for the worms and maggots and where their minds are, who can guess? Maybe some race of alien being has bottled their energy and now hawks it on the side of a celestial turnpike to passing saucers. If the source of these alien creature's livelihood dries up because a few human scientists decide to play god, humanity may be in a whole heap of trouble. These aliens are imbibing Tiberius, for heaven's sake! Do we really want to take such rapid leaps backwards in the name of progress? Why give Hitler a second chance?

Let's be content with what we have and not risk the U.F.O.s descending upon us!

Barsoom

Today I rode the transport service to the hospital district where I made a donation of my precious bodily fluids. It has been some time since I've done this, but the procedure hasn't changed all that much. The facilities are very nice: open-concept with mezzanine, glass and girders, windows and skylights all over. The space station life-saver.

The nurse asking the embarrassing screening questions noticed I had a book with me and asked what it was. I chuckled self-deprecatingly, "The God's of Mars by Ed Rice Burroughs". She recognized the name but couldn't place it. "He invented Tarzan" I said. So we got to talking a little about books. Her dark little secret? The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest. Mine? Not wishing to be out-done, "The Twilight series".

Burroughs is a guilty pleasure too. But relevant to my present studies.

times 2

It looks as though our power shortage of last night has been handled. We have connected the machine to the outpost's external power supply via electron hose. In lay-people's terms, we plugged it in.

Now the only problem is time travel. I appear to be moving much too rapidly through time this morning. It is already nine minutes to nine! I have to hop aboard my two wheels in ten minutes and visit my employer for six hours. Oddly enough, once I arrive at my destination the speed of time will slow down to half its normal rate.

There may be a solution to my time traveling conundrum, however. Relativity! How I perceive time is the key. Have you ever noticed how quickly time seems to move when you aren't doing anything in particular, have no deadlines, are on holiday? As soon as it is necessary to view measurement of time, you see how much has gone by without your notice. Likewise, if you have a deadline, you tend to keep track of all you need to do to complete a task on time, and there often doesn't seem enough time. The strain of constant reference to what time it is relative to the deadline appears to speed up time.

Is time really speeding up though? Do we travel through time or in time? The key must be that time "appears" to be increasing or decreasing speed, relative to our thoughts! So, time travel is possible how? With mind-control!

times

Time travel is possible. More than possible, time travel is necessary and we do it every day. Where it gets difficult is traveling in any direction other than forward through time. It occurs to me just now that time travel to either side is either teleporting (i.e. instantaneous travel through space) or, in the case of multi-verses (as opposed to the concept of the universe), instantaneous travel to a different plane of physical existence.

I have tried backwards travel through time, but it mostly hasn't worked. I say mostly because human memory can be a powerful means of approximating backward time travel, but we remain physically locked in the present, so it doesn't quite work out.

More on this next time. I am now running on reserve battery power.

slowly growing old

Every day brings something new. Discovery! Why is this so easy to forget? Am I programmed to forget? Do we program ourselves, or are the Martians secretly in control? Does it matter? What you think matters! That you think matters! What you believe can change.

There is no such thing as boredom if you convince yourself there is no such thing as boredom. But this quickly becomes problematic: you must first have some conception of boredom in mind in order to say that it is false, untrue, not of this world. This is a black hole. The really vastly large phenomena we inhabit, life, time, the whateververse, are riddled with these. But the void, intellectual or inside-out star, can't be without the something, the everything, that is evident all around. Smell a flower, draw a picture, take some of that anti-matter within your mind's grasp and put it to use. There is so little time. So please, live like there is nothing tomorrow, and something right now.

teeth

Between the months of August and May, the School of Dentistry screens potential patients for training purposes. There is a 50% reduction in fees, but the dental work is very, very slow. We may be signing me up for the longest cleaning and cavity filling in the history of forever.

Immortality through dental check-ups. Research in this field could yield amazing discoveries pertinent to long-distance space travel. Put on the mask or take the needle and when you awaken, you're in the Gasdaaaagagu Galaxy light-years away from planet Earth, your breath is minty-fresh and your smile shines like the porcelain goddess.

I should probably take advantage of the reduced fees now. Once cryogenic freezing/thawing is common practice, the students are going to be in high demand. Painless dentistry while exploring the whateververse. I can hardly wait for the future.

L.R.O.C.

http://wms.lroc.asu.edu/lroc_browse/view/M109134835LE

L.R.O.C. stands for "Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera". This is the camera that allows Earthlings to take close-up pictures of their moon. The Hubble Space Telescope is incapable of such detailed, zoomed images. The link above will lead you to a picture on the interweb taken by L.R.O.C. of the Apollo 16 landing site. It looks like they left a large quantity of garbage behind. Typical human behaviour. Oh well, you can't take it with you, and at least it's not in Earth's orbit, causing damage to spacecraft.

twocycles

We've had a few busy days recently, so it's been harder than usual to keep you all furnished with new reading material.

This evening, as the Earth horizon slips over the sun and darkness and cold descend, I am a bit more tired than usual. Today was the first day back on the bicycle, winter cycling to and from my workplace. In only a few weeks, my endurance levels have fallen considerably. Despite the soreness, it feels good to be back. Even the human astronauts use cycling to stay fit (albeit stationary). Have a look at this interweb strand:

http://www.space.com/6464-astronauts-patch-space-bicycle.html

Here is a little old-time tune. Maybe Martian music did or would sound something like this?