The Evolution Control Commitee's alternative controller setup

THIS is what I want. At work. At home. On the bus. When I sleep.

My MFA is even more worthless now

Robo coffee makers at the Korea Robo World 2008:



Of course they don't got one that teaches English. Yet. But I think I may even fail the Turing test at my online job, so it all evens out.

Freee Million-dollar idea:
Robo bar

So Long Losers, Whom I've Always Hated

No just kidding, that's a reference to Futurama. One of those things I think about and I can't help inwardly if not outwardly chuckle about. (Just like John Oliver's Fox News gatecrashing.) I thought it was a funny line, and I've been saying to people around here, but it's not true. I haven't always hated you. I've never hated you.

I thought it would fun to do that in intermediate to advanced language class and explore the nuances of these phrases:

I love you.
I always love you.
I am always loving you.
I have loved you.
I have always loved you.
I loved you.
I could have loved you.
I would have loved you.
I might have loved you.
I should have loved you.
I wouldn't have loved you...etc....

Obviously, you could do it with other verbs, but using love (or hate) would make it more interesting for the class.

Anyhow, when we're on the subject of Robots, there's buzz on the net: an interesting question posed by an interesting blog [or blogs I don't understand the web anymore (I found it via popurl.com)]: if you were a robot, and I knew, but you didn't, would you want me to tell you you were a robot?

Interesting. But it would sure depend on the robot. If it's the air-hockey robot, it might just reply that it doesn't care, as long as it beats you in air-hockey. These kinds of questions are why most of San Francisco, I mean Science Fiction sucks.

I'll be in San Francisco on Tuesday!

Maybe the question should be: if you were a robot, and I knew, but you didn't, would I want me to kiss you? Interesting twist, eh?

Now I'm going to use a robot translator for my love poem:

Here's English to Danish to English:
I love you. I forever love you. I am forever affectionate you. I've love you. I've forever love you. I love you. I could receive love you. I ville receive love you. I be at liberty to receive love you. I ought receive love you. I ville that no receive love you. and the like

Here's English to German to German to Polish to Polish to English:
me tendering this status pleasantry until yield owa on collateral until lichen programming language classify as well ausbaldowieren this nuances over this phrases : me love she. me in each love she. me bin in each fond she. me assets loves she. me assets in each loves she. me loves she. me may rashness well-beloved she. me status possess loves she. me mógł rashness well-beloved she. me ought rashness well-beloved she. me status rashness well-beloved she. etc.

Here's English to Brazilian Portueguese to BP to Bulgarian to Bulgarian to English:
АЗ чудо he shoulder be play action a част what em middle определителен член front език ear & investigate определителен член shade на these phrase : АЗ love you. АЗ always love you. АЗ be always lover you. АЗ obtain love you. АЗ obtain always love you. АЗ love you. АЗ p.t. from can tem love you. I'd have love you. АЗ p.t. from may obtain love you. I'd have love you. АЗ as if have love you. etc.

here's my favorite so far, English-Italian-Dutch-Spanish-English
MY thought spent would creature pleasure run on leave expensive whom UNITED NATIONS hub run on leave UNITED NATIONS staid tongue scope or substantiation does the point until multicolored nought this saying : MY sweetmeat you. MY forever sweetmeat you. They swimm forever loving you. I've sweetmeat you. I've forever sweetmeat you. MY sweetmeat you. MY might one's sweetmeat you. MY would creature one's sweetmeat you. MY May MY one's sweetmeat you. MY will one's sweetmeat you. MY would creature one's sweetmeat you. etc

Here's more translator experimentation.

(Go ahead and kick your robot friend in the back of the knee. Actually, the name of that jpeg is "the robot that would not fall down!" And would a robot that can't fall down need friends???)
The real question is, if you know your friend is a robot, and they don't know you're a robot, I mean, they don't know that they're really the robot, how do you know you're not really a robot too??????? Ooooooooooh.

Obscurantics; Politics; Michael's Status Updates: Symbology of Snails, Idiophones; A Glimpse of our Nightmare Future

The N-ero-nomicon hands over some potent info that is pretty, his terms, "brain-melting."

There's some links in there to some Bruce Sterling, who always has an interesting point of view (when I can understand it.)

I love Glenn Greenwald. He does the dirty job; he relentlessly, meticulously dissects absolute stupidity. And unlike others, like Atrios and Sadly, No!; it's almost one hundred percent earnest. He makes a "snarky" comment here and there. (I hate that word, snark, btw.) But really he methodically compiles and dissects like no other blogger. Atrios is an unstoppable, indispensable font of inside-jokes, bite-size snarks; and Sadly, No! is a lunatic snarkative of epic proportions. I love it all, (Except the word snark.) But Greenwald anally probes the dark recesses of our elite discourse and the societal and global consequences in an almost obsessive fashion where one such as myself asks "Why? We pretty much knew this." GG does it because WE DESPERATELY NEED this critical examination of our political-social system. If not for the record, if not for posterity, for the same reason Joyce had to write Finnegan's Wake. Because somebody had to do this thing, how ludicrous it is, it is necessary for the human species. It comes down to tiny details, from the pompous inferences of Maureen Dowd, the blatant recklessness of such "serious and respectable" politicians such as John McCain, and his sensitive attentiveness to other bloggers in the community--some not extremely well known. He has gone into considerable analysis of the coverage regarding Hillary Clinton. The fucked-up attention to her tears, and the disregarding of croco-tears from Rightwingers. He's gone into depth about rightwing, dipshitted barbs about masculinity. I don't know who GG he supports. It doesn't matter. With his analysis, and other articles like this one from Gloria Steinem seem to indicate that the accrued skeletons in American closets out number Americans. We shouldn't discount the murmurings from the right about Obama either. There's a lot of discussion in the left blogosphere about that too. And it is scary to think about what's going to come out in our culture out of the elite-punditry, the conglomerates--not to mention actual blatant racists and sexists--who don't want to see Obama or Hillary in the Whitehouse. Again, these are all issues being picked up by the big name bloggers. No matter how in the pocket Obama and Clinton seem to be in big money, their "identities" will always be front in center in a lot of people's mind. In many ways this is good, because everything will get out in the open; and the Republican party's monkey-brained efforts may expose their bigotry possibly more than anything else in this country could.

Anyhow, some more links.

Here's a good wikipedia link of percussion instruments. I was looking for crotales. I love crotales. Also the celeste. There's a celeste played by Bruno S. in Strosyek, and last weekend I watched it with some buddies and I couldn't think of the name of the instrument. Tonight I had the same experience with crotales. I would like to write music for percussion ensembles again. I've been getting into Lou Harrison.

I love the names of the categories: Idiophones, Membranophones, Chordophone, Aerophone, Electrophone.


How's Kat-man doing? I'll google his name. Is this your Massachusetts band? Your JET profile disappeared.

Slugman is still in NY, I hear. Temping for those fascists at Prep for Prep. Give us a shout out.

Man, facebook is addictive. I'm always doing the status updates, and I try to make them clever. Some of my friends, especially some former co-workers at the greasy hagwon I used to work for do extremely clever ones. This is Michael's latest:

Michael Sperry is lined up in a row and moved through narrow runways leading to a chute with spring loaded doors.

Michael: This is Poetry. And I'm a POETRY EXPERT. (I decided that last night--I'll go more into this in the future.) I'd love to visit that fucker if he didn't live in Texas. Scratch that cause it might be warm there now. I'm thinking Greyhound, but I want to go back to New York City REAL BAD. My current status update is "Daniel is whirring his siren." I liked it because it has key notes of anxiety and absurdism; in addition, it is concise, has a strong verb and can be taken as metaphor or as a euphemism. I spent many hours last night while I couldn't sleep thinking up this status update. And I was aghast to see that, in the mean time, Michael had come up with one that was much more clever. If I channeled this energy I expend into some other form think of what I could do. (Much less Michael Sperry.) Thankfully, as I grew tired, my mind wandered away from the facebook status update into ideas for stories and poems and etc. But those ideas kind of faded away as I came upstairs this morning to check email and update my facebook status. S


Sometimes I look at my past blog entries and I wonder to myself, "Why did I write all this?" It doesn't make sense. It's just a bunch of blabber. It's nice to have on record, I guess. I'm not seriously working on any projects except a few very noisy dronal recordings (available here--sorta, actually what I've uploaded so far are things I did years ago. But I've been making new ones.) Meanwhile I have two novels and one serious internet project that needs working on, which I will probably go more into detail in the future. NO, goddamnit, I will go into depth in the future.

thod, for Channukah gave me a very interesting book, the Dictionary of Symbols. Each entry gives symbology and there derivations from various cultures. Esoterical, obscurantical, erudite, eccentric. Bringing a former subject to the front burner, here's insight into the symbology of snails:

snail Universally regarded as lunar symbols, snails are signs of the regular cycle of rebirth; as the Moon waxes and wanes, so snails expose and retract their horns; they are signs of death and rebirth, motifs of the eternal homecoming.
The snail, with its spiral shell, linked to the phases of the Moon, and the tumescence of its horns, also stands for fertility. 'Thus the snail becomes the scene of a lunar theophany, as in the ancient religion of Mexico in which the moon god, Tecciztecatl, is shown enclosed in a snail's shell' [Reference]
Like all molluscs, the snail displays sexual symbolism in the analogy between its substance, motion and excretions with those of the vulva.
It also symbolizes the enduring within the changeable. 'The helical shape of the land- or sea-snail's shell provides an universal glyph of the eternity being within the fluctuations of change' [Reference]
For the Aztecs, snails were symbols of conception, pregnancy and birth. In Benin they are regarded as reservoirs of semen. [Reference]
In Egyptian hieroglyphics, the snail stood for the SPIRAL. Like that geometric shape, present throughout the natural world, it might well have symbolized the evolution of life.
In North Africa, snail's shells are made into necklaces.

Snails have shells of the pattern of ram's horns....In addition they partake of moisture and only come out, as the peasants say, after the rain. They are linked to the agricultural cycle and have become the symbol of the fertility bestowed by the dead, a necklace of their shells being the almost essential adornment of the ancestor who returns to mortal earth to make it fertile, bearing with him all the symbols of the face of Heaven and of the beneficent rain-storms. [Reference]

How can I follow that?

Well, I'll try. I always liked the Remote Controlled Robot fightshow on Comedy Central because I thought it was an uncanny vision of our future. Well, in between fights, how about Robot Air-Hockey?

And some awefulness for you: Mainly the music. This is why we need my website I'm developing. Or trying to, I'll go into that later.

If I don't get my way, the whole world may be so terribly awful, that youtube provides only a scant, glimpse of our awful future. (You could read this post over and over because the first "point" connects with the last "point." It's a moebius blog-band.)

The Economics of Robot Warfare

Why are they building robots to carry away troops? Doesn't this put the entire genre of Science Fiction to shame? Robots are supposed to fight our wars...or does that put a limit on the political value of war? I have always been a fan of robot wars, and I always predicated my fandom on the idea that the future would be nothing but a robotic holocaust. But now I guess we have to wait for robots to develop feelings and genitals so that we have a real attachment to them and that way they would be worth sacrificing to a "political" cause, whether it be the so-called spreading of "democracy", or a strategic land and oil grab. (Need I say it?) Are we afraid of creating mindless killing machines? (I didn't think so.)

As a former scoutmaster explained to my scout troop the scout meeting before a skeet shoot, every time a man is wounded in combat, we lose a total of three soldiers because two men have to haul the bleeder back. So if you take the total number of wounded in the current Iraq conflict, officially 23,000, you can times that number by 3 for effective loses. I know my estimate doesn't equate to actual loses in soldiers because after the men haul the bleeder back they probably quickly or somewhat quickly return to the front, depending on the situation. But even if my estimate is wildly off, economically, you can see that it is probably more efficient to build a robot that hauls troops rather than one that kills them. First of all, any soldier that goes down the other soldiers can leave for dead. No interruption, just pure fighting--that increases the efficiency of the total fighting force at any one time by what, say 150%? (I'm just an English teacher, I have no idea.) Second, a robot-killing machine would have to be taken care of by robot-repairers, so there you go, the same old problem. Of course, if a robot has an arm blown off, it can still go on. Unless it has the aforementioned feelings and genitals, then it may feel real pain and unable to go on and eventually have to be rebooted in the robot mental ward.

So, you see, those military guys really know what they're doing.