Spam from the Future
Sure, it is spam, but it is, without a doubt, the most entertaining piece of spam I've received. I mean, come on, people from the future are slapping me with junk mail now. What's that say about the future of technology?
"Hello,I'm a time traveler stuck here in 2003. Upon arriving here my dimensional warp generator stopped working. I trusted a company here by the name of LLC Lasers to repair my Generation 3 52 4350A watch unit, and they fled on me. I am going to need a new DWG unit, prefereably the rechargeable AMD wrist watch model with the GRC79 induction motor, four I80200 warp stabilizers, 512GB of SRAM and the menu driven GUI with front panel XID display.
I will take whatever model you have in stock, as long as its received certification for being safe on carbon based life forms.
In terms of payment: I dont have any Galactic Credits left. Payment can be made in platinum gold or 2003 currency upon safe delivery of unit. Please transport unit in either a brown paper bag or box to below coordinates on Sunday July 27th at (exactly 3:00pm) Eastern Stand Time. If you miss this timeframe please email me.
42.4845467 & Longitude -71.1576157 and the ground is 101.3' above sea level.
Although those coordinates are a secure guarded area, these channels through email are never secure. Unfortunately it is the only form of communication I have right now. There is a good chance that sombody will try to redirect the signal. The unit must be teleported directly in a way that nobody will be able to interfere with the transference.
After unit has been sent please email me at: XXXX@federalfundingprogram.com with payment instructions. Do not reply directly back to this email. [Because they had spammed me with an empty return address. Naturally. -m]
Thank You"
Latitude 42.48 N, Longitude 71.15 E is just outside of Këksaj in Kyrgyzstan. Middle of nowhere, but not so far from someplace that Lonely Planet doesn't have an entry for the country. No mention of Këksaj, but I'm sure that some fellow with a brown paper bag or a box, looking to make a meet, wouldn't look out of place.
Investment Advice
Cleaning out my inbox, I stumbled across an old joke. It's a "ha ha" thick with the panic of a man whose 401(k) is still struggling to recover, but still a "ha ha" nonetheless.
Here's some thoughtful investment analysis:
If you had bought $1000.00 worth of Nortel stock one year ago, it would now be worth $49.00. With Enron, you would have $16.50 of the original $1,000.00. With Worldcom, you would have less than $5.00 left.
If you had bought $1,000.00 worth of Budweiser (the beer, not the stock) one year ago, drank all the beer, then turned in the cans for the 10 cent deposit, you would have $214.00.
Based on the above, my current investment advice is to drink heavily and recycle."
VR Panorama
It's French week at Panorama VR, a site which collects QuickTime VR images from around the world. The next best thing to actually traveling, QuickTime VR allows you to take panoramic pictures of a space and stitch them all together into a single image which can be manipulated by the user. So, if you can't manage to climb to the top of Mount Everest, you can at least see what the view is like.
Say Goodbye to the Banana
"Black sigatoka" probably means nothing to you, but if you were a banana, it is a phrase which means the End of Days for you. The Cavendish banana is the single variety which is now enjoyed by most of the Western world when they peel into the yellow fruit and black sigatoka is the fungal disease which is wiping out the fruit. Panama disease, a type of soil fungus, wiped out the Gros Michel variety of banana in the 1950s, and science came through with a solution in the Cavendish. Howeve, much like the Gros Michel before it, the Cavendish is an evolutionary dead-end, sterile and hugely unresistant to diseases. There isn't much that can be done and scientists are predicting that the banana may be exist within ten years.
I'm about six months behind on this story (which can be found at BBC Online and at the Globe and Mail), but didn't want to wake up one morning and find them gone at the supermarket.
Ghosts in the Wires
My new wireless network at home appears to be settling down. I posited the possibility of ghosts infecting the gHz range that I had parceled out for myself over in this SYMBOLIC entry, and it seems that even the ghosts get confused when you reverse the streams. It's an old Ghostbusters trick and it appears to have worked for me. Go figure. So, if you've got Belkin wireless networking devices and they're giving you fits, try reversing the access points. It is complete voodoo, but it works for me. The ions must need to flow a certain direction at my latitude.
The Cottage, The Cottage
For a brief moment today, http://www.fields-of-the-nephilim.com worked, and I got to see the short intro movie where the spectre of Carl McCoy led me to the cottage and swore me to secrecy. Alas, now, it is all gone and I have only the possibility of a .mov file in my cache to verify that I wasn't dreaming. I have to console myself with visiting Eden, Andrew Collins' site, and catching up on the latest news of the Watchers and other ephemera of the Ancient races. It's not quite the same.
Summer Solstice
Also known as: Alban Heflin, Alben Heruin, All-couples day, Feast of Epona, Feast of St. John the Baptist, Feill-Sheathain, Gathering Day, Johannistag, Litha, Sonnwend, Thing-Tide, Vestalia. There is a list here of the numerous religious signifigances of this date. This is Midsummer and this night (the shortest) is the night that Titania dreams of a man with the head of an ass and falls in love with him.
This is the time for harvesting those plants which were put in the ground during the Vernal Equinox. This is the beginning of summer, though I have always been a little confused as to why summer only starts at the longest day of the year. The answer, as it turns out, is due to the fact that it takes a good long while to heat the oceans and their temperature runs a month or two behind the passage of the sun. The full moon in July is called the "Honey Moon" because, traditionally, the period following the Equinox is the best time to harvest honey from the hives.
Here at 47.27 ° N, 122.58 ° W sunrise was at 5:11AM, the solstice proper took place at 12:10PM, and sunset came at 9:11PM. Sixteen hours of daylight is a spit in the bucket for those living ten or more degrees closer to the Arctic Circle, but it is far enough north for me. I'm looking forward to the return of the shorter days. I like light, just not being poured down on my head. Twilight is good. So is dawn.
The Perfect Birthday Gift for Librarians
The perfect gift for the librarian in your life (and I've got one). Her (or his) very own action figure. Accoutrements, a Seattle-based "outfitter of popular culture," has revealed that they'll be releasing a librarian action figure this fall as part of their program of highlighting those under-appreciated occupations. Apparently, this action-ready Master of the Stacks goes one better than G. I. Joe's Kung-Fu Grip: she's armed and dangerous with the upraised finger and the ready "Shhhhhh!" noise.
And, while you're shopping for one, you might as well take a spin through Archie McPhee's, where twenty dollars can get you a lot of silly things. Including a trio of Pig Catapults with enough change left over for a latte or two.
Call of Cthulhu
Bethesda Softworks is preparing a version of Call of Cthulhu for release, ah, I don't know when, but not soon enough, damnit! "The technology powering Call of Cthulhu has provided Headfirst with the means to present an incredibly detailed and accurate depiction of the sights and sounds of this unique 1920’s New England setting. A diverse range of cutting edge special effects is utilized to ensure both unprecedented levels of realism and an exact portrayal of your mental degradation." The next best thing to actually saying, you know, His Name thrice? Inquisitive lads can only hope.
No Shoggoth
Not a shoggoth after all. News this morning about the washed up carcass in Chile. Turns out it was just what happens to sperm whales when they die. "When a sperm whale dies at sea, it rots until it becomes a 'skeleton suspended in a semi-liquid mass within a bag of skin and blubber,' the scientists said. Eventually, the skin tears and the bones sink while the skin and blubber float." (from CNN.com). Bummer. And kinda nasty.
New Planets
Astronomers have been busy finding old and Earth-like planets. The first is a gaseous giant, double the size of Jupiter, which is about 13 billion years old. Circling a pulsar and a white dwarf 5,600 light years away in Scorpio, this planet is the oldest object Earth astronomers have been able to spot. Closer to home, in HD70642 (in Puppis, a constellation that makes up the stern of the Argo Navis, the ship used by the Argonauts) there is another gas giant (because, you know, they are the easiest to spot). This Jupiter-like planet is in approximately the same celestial position as our own gas giant, leading scientists to consider the certain possibility of denser planets on closer orbits. The system is 90 light years away which, at our current level of technology, would take us about a half million years to reach. So until we get better telescopes or discover a FTL drive, we're just guessing.
Operation Paperclip
"After WWII ended in 1945, victorious Russian and American intelligence teams began a treasure hunt throughout occupied Germany for military and scientific booty. They were looking for things like new rocket and aircraft designs, medicines, and electronics. But they were also hunting down the most precious "spoils" of all: the scientists whose work had nearly won the war for Germany. The engineers and intelligence officers of the Nazi War Machine." Operation Paperclip. I'm doing research again.
Calling Marconi
"With total justification Guglielmo Marconi is called the pioneer of wireless, freeing communications from the constraints imposed by fixed cable and visible distance. Conquering distance, he facilitated commercial and mass communication, bringing all parts of the world closer together." When Marconi died on July 20th, 1937 wireless stations around the world were silent for a day in tribute to what the man had accomplished. For an instant, the noise in the ether ceased. Extensive Marconi information at -- what else? -- www.marconicalling.com.
Shoggoth!
CNN.com: SANTIAGO, Chile (Reuters) -- "Chilean scientists were baffled on Tuesday by a huge, gelatinous sea creature found washed up on the southern Pacific coast and were seeking international help identifying the mystery specimen."
The only thing the Encyclopedia Mythica is missing is a section on the Cthulhu mythos, which would certainly help these folk down in Chile identify the cast-off skin of dreaming Cthulhu that has washed up from sunken R'lyeh.
Speaking of the Old Ones, which Old One are you? Take the quiz and find out.
Encyclopedia Mythica
"In Middle English pertriche 'partridge,' was derived from Perdix, one of Athene's sacred kings, thrown in the seas from a tower, and carried to heaven in the form of a bird by his goddess. He was the partridge, she the pear tree. Athena was worshipped in Boeotia as Once, the Pear Tree, mother of all pear trees. Perdix, whose name originally meant 'the Lost One,' was a form of Vishnu-Narayana, called Lord of the Pear Trees in his holy city of Badrinath in the Himalayas (from badri, 'pear tree'). The pear tree had a feminine-masculine significance through Eurasia. It was also sacred to Hera, whose oldest image at Heraeum in Mycenae was made of pear wood. European peasants considered the pear a favorite 'life-tree' for a girl. In Russia pears were used as protective charms for cows. It seems that when the partridge in a pear tree was made into a Christmas carol the symbol of Christ was substituted for Perdix."
The Encyclopedia Mythica has entries for all sorts of fascinating mythological and religious symbolism, including this entry for "partridge in a pear tree." The collection has been online since 1995 and has over 1600 entries for myths, legends, and folklore.
'Guins!
"Patagonia's Marine Menagerie: The plains of Patagonia in Argentina are dry and rugged; almost every bush bristles with thorns. But where the plains meet the Atlantic Ocean, there's an explosion of life. Armies of sea animals haul themselves ashore to breed and bear young. In this National Geographic Radio Expedition, NPR's Christopher Joyce visits two biologists studying the region's wildlife. Every summer at Argentina's Punta Tombo, hundreds of thousands of Magellanic penguins claim a 10-mile stretch of coastline."
One of the two is University of Washington's Dee Boersma whose research is being charted right over here at her Penguin Studies website. And -- holy sardines, Batman! -- she actually does a penguin sight-seeing tour. A month-long cruise down south to see and smell the wee birds first-hand. Okay, if I had known ten years ago...