Akkadian Driftwood

It's stating the obvious to say that dreams are strange. In fact it is normal that dreams are strange. Once in a while a particular dream experience stands out. Last night I was involved in a project with two women in which we were writing a paper on the Akkadians, a people who lived in ancient Mesopotamia. As part of the project I was going to create a timeline that summarised Akkadian history and then create a web page that displayed significant Akkadian cultural artifacts. As in many dreams the goal I set out for myself could not be achieved. I would get on the wrong bus, or be delayed and distracted by people I met. At one point I managed to make it to a reference book and found that there was no entry for Akkadians. There were "Ai" entries like "Airplane" and "Al" entries like "Alberta" but there were no "Ak" entries in the book. Someone asked me if I was sure that the Akkadians existed. I said that I was certain, but then I began to doubt myself. I spent most of the dream night searching for references to the Akkadians. At one point I was in a library/museum and there was a great stone statue in the middle of the room. It had pieces missing from it but from inside came noise. Clanking and humming. It frightened me but at the same time I felt this had something to do with the mystery of the Akkadians. At one point the statue rumbled and we all fled from the building on a cart of hay pulled by donkeys.

I woke up with the strong feeling that my task was incomplete so I looked up the Akkadians on the internet. This is what I found:

The Akkadian Empire was established by Sargon I after the Akkadians conquered the Sumerians. It existed from approximately 2340 BCE to 2180 BCE. The capital was Akkad which may have been located where Babylon later came to be. The language of Akkadina was a Semitic language. After Sargon's death the empire continued to expand until around 2180 BCE the Gutians invaded from the Zagros in the north and Elamites joined them in rebellion paving the way for the creation of the Sumerian empire. At its height, the empire covered the lands from Anatolia in the north to inner Persia in the east, Arabia in the south, and the Mediterranean in the west.

Grown

Leslie is always showing me these really intersting web sites with puzzles, illusions and general fun and strangeness. I asked her why she doesn't post links to these things. I said if you don't I might as well. So this weeks borrowed discovery is Grow Cube. Choose the right sequence and watch marvelous things happen.

Any Major Dude

One of the things that always made Steely Dan strange (besides being named after a dildo from William S. Burroughs Naked Lunch) were their lyrics. On the one hand they were the epotomy of LA cocaine smooth production, on the other hand they loved jazz more than rock and wrote songs about deviants, perverts and ne're do wells wrapped in something so palitable you didn't know you what you were swallowing until it was too late. One of my favourite Steely Dan songs is Any Major Dude. A song which Wilco covers live by the way. It's not one of their stranger songs I think.

I never seen you looking so bad my funky one
You tell me that your superfine mind has come undone

Any major dude with half a heart surely will tell you my friend
Any minor world that breaks apart falls together again
When the demon is at your door
In the morning it won’t be there no more
Any major dude will tell you

Have you ever seen a squonk’s tears? well, look at mine
The people on the street have all seen better times

I can tell you all I know, the where to go, the what to do
You can try to run but you can’t hide from what’s inside of you

Hot Sauce Recipe

Being a hot sauce lover I decided to try making my own hot sauce today. Here is the recipe I came up with:

3 tbsp red wine vinegar
1 tbsp lime juice
1 tsp cayenne powder
1 habanero pepper
1 cubanelle pepper
1 roasted jalapeno pepper
3-4 cloves of garlic
1/2 tomato
sprig of cilantro
fresh ground black pepper
salt to taste

Blend until smooth. For a thicker sauce cut back on the tomato.
I've decided to name this flaming delight, Leslie's Flaming Delight after her fiery red hair and delightful personality. I'll have to come up with a label.

Slippery Devil

I went to see "Ice Harvest" the new film by Harold (Crazy Legs) Ramis, this evening. It's being marketed as being by the director of Caddy Shack and Groundhog Day, which is true but misleading, and as the season's Bad Santa, which is just a lie. What it is, is a was a deep dark film about male middle age crises wrapped in Quentin Tarantino violence as humour. It stars John Cusack as a corrupt mob lawyer and Billy Bob Thorton as his pornographer pal. Together they concoct a plan to steal 2 M$$$ and change from one of Cusack's mob clients (Randy Quaid). Shenanigans bleak and sordid follow. I quite enjoyed the film even though in places it slipped (haw haw). When it was funny it was very funny. Cusack's acting does manage to bring a lot of the undertow to the surface especially in his eyes. However it was trying hard to be something it never quite was. The ending reminded me in a funny way of the end of Midnight Cowboy where the Cowboy and Ratso Rizzo are on the bus headed for Florida. Boys who never fully grew up will probably relate to this the most.

Weird Trees

My server provider for the Glob and Wail goofed up somewhere so I have not been accessible for the last couple of days. The problem seems to be rectified now but they didn't give me an explanation. I'm not at all happy about how hard it was to reach them either however there service is dirt cheap so I guess it's a case of getting what you paid for.

Meanwhile it snowed the other day; real snow. I went walking in it and saw these weird trees down along the Rideau River.

Let it Snow

Childhood was an intense time full of what now seem extreme emotions and sensations. Fear, horror, anxiety, astonishment, delight, amazement, wonder and magic. Over the years these things for better or worse recede but when the first snowfall comes it still revives that old feeling of something exciting about to happen. Rather than try to put into words, I direct you to this, the last Calvin and Hobbes comic strip published on my 30th birthday in 1995. I know that it's easy to idealize childhood but for me this strip could be biographical.

Things That go Chomp in the Night

It's been a good month for paleontologists. Last week an intact skull of a newly discovered species of giant sea crocodile, Dakosaurus andiniensis, was located in Argentina. This week a relative of the mosasaur was found near Dallas and thus named Dallasaurus. Dakosaurus is dated at 135 million years ago, while Dallasaurus is dated at 92 million years ago.

Shards

A few weeks ago Dave and I rented David Cronenberg's Spider. I think that it would make an interesting double feature with Mulholland Drive. The thing both films have in common is that the fractured narrative reflects the subjective experience of the main character. Some films will use this technique for dream sequences or other altered states of mind but these usually are at odds with the omniscient observational point of view of the rest of the film. In the case of Spider we are completely dependent on the point of view of Spider himself as to events. Spider however is mentally ill. What this means for the viewer is that fact and fancy are indistinguishable. As a viewer we cannot trust what we see anymore than Spider can trust his own memories. Spider spends much of his time in a halfway home trying to remember events of his past. In another way he is trying to reinvent his past. Like Betty/Dianne in Mulholland drive he seems to be shaping events to remember things as he wants them to have been rather than as they were.

As a viewer we are at a loss to know where the truth ends and the fabrication begins. Just as SPider cannot trust his own memory, the viewer cannot trust what is on the screen. Ultimately Spider struggles to maintain his illusions and as with Betty/Dianne reality bursts into fantasy uninvited. Sir Walter Scott's words "Oh what a tangled web we weave, When first we practise to deceive!" seems to apply to self-deception as much as lies intended for others.

Neither movie attempts to resolve the narrative. Endings are as open-ended as dreams both Spider and Betty/Dianne remain lost in their own worlds built out of guilt, disappointment and obsession.

The Fisher King might also serve as an interesting companion piece as a very different way of telling the story of a mentally ill individual. Whereas that movie romaticizes the illness, Spider is bleak and unsentimental and therefore the more disturbing of the two by far.

Gal Pal Val

Valerie came to visit last Tuesday evening, getting a ride up from New York with her friend also named Val. We hadn't seen each other for over two years but we picked up right away as if it had been two weeks. It was a lot colder here than she had expected so I had to lend her a heavy sweater and hat for trucking around outdoors.It was really nice having company, working and eating together. And great conversation! I'm really glad she was able to make it here and to boot we made a lot of progress on developing her new web site. I hope that it's not another two years before we meet in person once more.

Glob & Wail Celebrates the 1000th Post

When Valerie heard that the Glob and Wail was celebrating it's 1000th posting she roared up on her private jet from NYC. Here she is in front of the Parliament building explaining what the Glob means to the future of mankind. I won't share the specific words since it wasn't very flattering.



I was going to right a big reflective essay on what the blog has meant to me to commemorate this occassion but that would require more effort than I'm willing to put in. However I will say that the Glob has been a means to rekindle old friendships, a way to make new friends. It opened the door to this wonderful friendship with Val. It was the the blog that brought Leslie, the love of my life, and I together. I can honestly say without a word of exaggeration that this blog was the conduit by which dreams have come true.

A special thank you to Bob for encouraging me to start this Blog in the summer of 2002.

Miscalculation

Ooops I noticed that I was mislabelling the posts. This is actually number 999 and tomorrow is the big number 1000th post. And boy do I have a surprise.

Rememberance Day

Post 997

I have my plan for the 1000th posting! Oh boy I can't believe it!

Post 996

France imposed a curfew the other night because 12 nights of anarchy are just one night too many >>>

Perhaps the French governments hesitation to impose the curfew has something to with the fact that the law in place was originally designed as part of France's colonial rule of Algeria.

Luna with Leslie's T-shirt

Imagine if the Internet were a Newspaper

I'm sure you are familiar with the World Weekly News. It was the template for about 75% of the internet with it's stories on conspiracies, aliens, girly pin-ups, freaks, bizarre sex, right wing inflammatory politics (ed anger), miracles and all sorts of pseudo-science and new agey hokum. It also seems to have served as inspiration for the X-files and our contemporary version of Pravada. Whether the WWN was serious or not is an open question, but my dear Grandmother (still reading newspapers at 91) believed. Especially in the religious miracles articles. She was never a believer in evolution and would probably be quite pleased with the path education in Kansas is taking these days. Bat boy is real dammit!!!

By the way only 6 more posts before the big 1,000. I still am not sure how to celebrate except maybe to climb to the top of the peace tower, guzzle down a bottle of Green Chartreuse and unfurl a Glob and Wail banner while I puke all over it. Does anyone NOT have any better ideas?

Top Ten Useless Limbs and Other Vestigial Organs

As compiled from Livescience.com

10. Wings on Flightless Birds

09. Hind Leg Bones in Whales

08. Erector Pili and Body Hair on Humans

07.The Human Tailbone (Coccyx)

06. The Blind Fish Astyanax Mexicanus

05. Wisdom Teeth in Humans

04. The Sexual Organs of Dandelions

03. Fake Sex in Virgin Whiptail Lizards (Vestigial Behavior)

02. Male Breast Tissue and Nipples

01. The Human Appendix

My biggest question is why are there so many examples from humans? It seems to me that male breast tissue and nipples in the great apes is equally vestigial. Is the appendix truly vestigial just because the body can function when it's removed? The pinkie can be removed, even a whole hand and a person can still live. Perhaps the function of the appendix is subtle. Not knowing somethings function is simply not knowing the function. In 1893, Robert Wiedersheim identified 86 human organs that had no known function as being vestigial. As for human hair pubic hair and armpit hair probably does have functionality. The idea that something can be designated useful/useless like an on /off switch is questionable to me. I think it's probably more useful to speak in terms of degree of importance. Just as one can live without a legs it does make life more difficult. A person can't live without a heart. A person can live quite easily without eyebrows, but they are convenient. Being non-essential is not quite the same thing as being useless and therefore vestigial. While many creationists like to take apart the concept of vestigial organs for obvious reasons my beef is not with evolutionary theory, rather it is with the taxonomy of things.

Vote Wal -Mart

When a corporation models its relationship to the public along the lines of a political campaign it's long past time to pull on the reigns. Coming after the popuar success of "Super-Size Me" comes the activist documentary, "Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price". In response Wal-Mart has commissioned its own film, "Why Wal-Mart Works & Why That Makes Some People Crazy." They even have there own blog just to show you how grass-rootsy they are. Although at the time of this writing they don't have a very good Google presence (I almost wrote web-presence and the fact that it may amount to the same thing is another story). Most of the references after a quick google are in reference to the movie "Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price." If my own home town is any indication, people in small towns do love Wal-mart. This of course is a distinct issue from whether they run an ethical business. How different is it from anyother large North American corporation in its practices? Is it a paragon or a parasite or none of the above.

In a sense this is typical marketing in that Wal-Mart is getting it's message out. However the interesting thing to me here is that they are responding to a perceived threat and then incorporating the threats method as it's own. Another way to look at it might be that they are being forced to play on the battlefield as defined by their foe. That is what I think is different. Fighting the battle "over there" so it doesn't have to be fought "over here" doesn't seem like it always works however.