I remember this  now . . . from way back in 1983. (Sound!)

LAIBACH practices provocation on the revolted state of the alienated consciousness (which must necessarily find itself an enemy) and unites warriors and opponents into an expression of a static totalitarian scream.

On the discussion forum for my Rio Karma mp3 player, this website is deplored and referred to only as the “website that shall not be named.”

Here, courtesy of Mother Russia, you can download any music you want for about about a dollar an album (via Paypal), in any file format and bitrate you desire (you can buy music in .ogg format!).  Some claim that their service is at this point still legal, and evan pays royalties to artists.  Which claims seem dubious, and still more dubious.   

I tried downloading a couple albums that I already own on vinyl, and the service is amazingly good.  How strongly should I resist the temptation to load up on other albums, unowned by me? 

I mean, I could always buy them later . . .

Bleh.  It’s late and I’m working on my talk and I can tell I’m going to be out of space before I even get to the play I’m discussing.  Which is what play, you wonder?  Hamlet.  Yes, isn’t it adorable that I’m giving a talk to the early modernists on this obscure work?  Typical of me, anyhow.

For your enjoyment, take a look at a picture that freaks me out a little and sort of breaks my heart.  On the left see pictured Mr. Nicholas Byfield, who was a dissenting Puritan who couldn’t really bring himself to really turn against the English church.  And I think his sermons show him to be a nice guy, concerned to give good guidance to his parishioners and to assure them that they were ok and not to worry and that they were probably not really predestined to the pit. 

His picture shows him with a sort of a smile unusual for preachers of the period, Puritan or otherwise.  Behind him are some sort of scrolls (Music?  Old and New Testament?  I can’t make them out.)

But what’s that in front of him, on the table?  Yeah, that blob there.  Well, it’s an “enormous ‘torturing stone’” removed from his bladder upon his death in 1622.  Writes the DNB:

“A post-mortem was conducted the following day revealing the presence of the stone, in appearance ‘like flint,’ which measured 15.5 inches ‘about the edges’ and approximately 13 inches long and 13 inches wide; it weighed 33 ounces [ . . . ] that in later life Byfield was ‘exceedingly afflicted’ by this unwanted calculus is probably an understatement [. . .] A small portrait [ . . . ] shows  on the lower part of the panel a rather unconvincing representation of the remarkable accretion which brought about his untimely demise.”

I do send out a small agnostic prayer for Mr. Byfield, and wish the fellow well.  I guess this stone killed him and then someone went back and painted a picture of it on top of Byfield’s portrait.  I cannot help but suspect that even the genial Mr. Byfield might not be so cheerful posing with this massive lethal lump.

Reading the Elizabethans one often has cause to thank whatever Gods may be for the accomplishments of modern medicine.  Which I now hereby do.

Just a link, new to me, for you darlings to investigate.

Struggling today under a huge load of papers to return tomorrow and a paper I have to read on Tuesday that, umm, shall we say. . . needs work?

So no real blogging for the next few days probably. 

But a couple interesting tidbits, one good, one bad (since we are nothing if not fair and balanced in our coverage of the question of the goodness of the world):

The New Off-Shoring.

A new encyclopedist RPG.

Adios for now, cruel blog!

So as I’m finishing up The Crying of Lot 49, the white smoke of burning ballots and  a grinning Loren Passerine announce that Dick Herman will the new chancellor of UI.

Meanwhile, a few miles down I-72, George W. Bush is unveils the new Lincoln Museum, full of holographic ghosts.

And also, this new Pope.  “Scourge of the Liberals,” this Benedict XVI fellow promises to be the greatest thing since Giorlamo “Error has no rights” Savonarola.  One Cardinal said, “John Paul was a great prophet, now we need a great king.”  Right.  Great idea.  A King-Pope doctrinal enforcer who’s credentials include a stint in the Hitler Youth.

It all recalls a forgotten role-playing game, to which I am able to find exactly one reference on The Internet:

There was an old black-and-white ad for a small-press wargame that used to
appear in the back of gaming magazines, year after year, back in the 80s.
Nobody I knew ever bought the game being advertised, which is why I assume the ad
eventually vanished.  In fact, I don’t even remember the *name* of the actual
game or even if it had one.  But my first Traveller group was quite found of
quoting this ad’s text, at appropriate moments during our games.  As I recall,
it ran something like:

“It’s The Year Of Our Lord [some unbelievably-high number].  The Inquisition
has arrived to conquer your planet.  Can you survive the Pope’s attack fleets?”

Meet the new future.  Same as the old one.

[but note also: Ratzinger and Opus Dei aren’t the only one who like their Catholicism hardcore.]

Here is a clip:

Exhibit A.

From today’s News-Gazette (AP):

Businessman and University of Illinois graduate Jeffery A ke routinely urged entrepreneurs to travel to other countries to pitch their products, once telling a group to think of foreign nations as “U.S. states with cultural nuances thrown in.”

But his frequent travels also made him a target.  He was apparently kidnapped by Iraqi insurgents during his second trip to Iraq in two years. [ . . . ]

A videotape aired Wednesday by Al-Jazeera television showed him being held at gunpoint by at least three assailants as the Indiana man clutched what appeared to be a photo and a passport.

No comment on this one, I think.  But I certainly do hope that Mr. A ke comes out of this alright.

A while back, after an absurd argument with the inexplicably hostile manager (I think she’s a manager) at Rentertainment, over a two dollar late fee on a scratched and unwatchable disk, I decided to try one of these on-line rent-by-mail video rental things.  Which has been interesting, and about which I could write at very great length. 

For a flat monthly fee, these services send you dvd’s in the mail.  You can have three of them out at any one time.  You pay 18, 15, or 12 dollars a month and can view a pretty good number of dvd’s, since it seems to take just a couple of days to send these dvd back and forth between your home and the processing centers.  The players are Netflix, Blockbuster, and Wal-Mart.  (I look forward to Amazon entering this market, too).

This kind of rental scheme is probably a good idea for people like me, who have a habit of constantly returning stuff late, and accruing many pointless fines, fees, and penalties in life.  With these rent-by-mail schemes, you not only avoid late fees when you hold onto a disk for long time, but you also tend to actually return stuff promptly once you’ve watched it, since you need only put the watched disc back into its mailer and your mailbox to complete the return, avoiding the time-wasting and easy to forget to do drudgery of taking the disc back to the store.

So while $15 per month seems a little steep, it’s less than I paid to local stores, when you figure-in late fees.  I’ve been renting with Blockbuster, as opposed to the slightly cooler Netflix.  Blockbuster sends you coupons for two in store rentals a month, which is a nice advantage.  Netflix seems to have more films to chose from and fewer titles that have waiting lists.  Blockbuster claims to be working on this.  There are also rumors that Blockbuster won’t stock NC-17 rated moves.  I’m not sure about this.  The website seems to stock both a cleaned-up ‘R’ version of “Y tu Mama Tambien” and an “unrated” version, as well.  So I’m not sure whether Blockbuster’s on-line version is a censorious as its brick-and-mortar locations.

Anyway, I’ve found a couple of sites that might be of interest to anybody using Netflix or Blockbuster, or even I guess Wal-Mart:

Hacking Netflix is of interest since it tracks the practices of both Netflix and Blockbuster.  It’s sort of necessary to do this to get a sense of how these companies are working.  Netflix especially (and Blockbuster t00) has a reputation for shipping quickly those who rent few dvds, and offering slower worse service to those who rent more, since of course their favorite customers are those who pay the monthly fee and rent almost nothing.  And they have other little tricks and things.  So you might look here to compare services,  and keep an eye on these companies.

Listology.com is a remarkable site that offers, well, lists.  Like the user-made lists of books, cd’s, etc. offered by Amazon.com, those at Listology are great for providing a sense of what films might be good to rent (plus, they’re much easier to search and navigate than Amazon’s lists).  The automated film recommenders at Netflix and Blockbuster seem to be of limited usefulness, but these lists, with their human touch are quite good.  For example, I finally got around to watching The President’s Analyst, and underappreciated Jame Coburn film recommended to me long ago by Zwichenzug.    By searching for this film at listology, I was able to find a list of promising ideas from a fan of TPA, and an equally promising list of films (ranked by # of stars) from 1967 (quite a year, it turns out).  Listology also links to lists posted at other websites, like film critic of the Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum’s more eclectic  alternative to the familiar AFI list of the 100 greatest films.

With all sorts of interesting and non-interesting lists, Listology seems like a neat tool for coming up with ideas for stuff to watch. 

Sorry for the sort of consumer-oriented post, but there you have it.  I am also open to any suggestions anyone might have for films I absolutely must see.

A lovely walk today, around the South Farms.  Past the Koi pond and the rock garden, and the Orchard Downs utopian paradise (slated for destruction, of course . . . like whole miscellaneous and not-so-developed South Farms area).  Not a long walk, but a good one, in warm air, with the trees just starting to bud, and only daffodils already in full bloom.  The plan was to complete the walk at the poison garden.  But once there, my companion ducked under the pine trees to look for horses.  None were to be found, but across the field that has seemed so promising were round barn numbers 1, 2, and 3.  A new adventure called!

So we made our way over to the barns.  There is a sign in front of them, noting that they are on the register of historic places.  Experimental dairy farms, the ideas motivating their design are a bit much to explain here.  But three of these rare structures stand, south of Roselawn cemetery, at the southern border of the UI’s development.

We approached the first of these (”Round Barn Number One”), and no hostiles seemed to be around.  We crept up to the window.  Through the window of round barn number one we spied an enormous woodchuck!  But the woodchuck fled, so we made our way into the basement, with its strange and futuristic dairy design.  Doing this was to step into the past.  Signs, tools, feed carts, and mechanical equipment lay in the silent round basement — everything encapsulated sometime surely before 1920.  An experiment in the future of food production abandoned but never cleaned up.  Now fit only for vagrant woodchucks, and maybe some dairy cow ghosts.

We made our way to round barn 2 (not so impressive), and then to barn 3, where we explored a second basement — this one seemingly abandoned in the 1940’s, but similarly preserved, full of dusty spherical glass milk receiving jars.  Exiting the basement of barn three, we found the first floor unlocked as well!  The doors opened, we entered the spacious interior of the barn, like a little Pantheon, with a concrete pillar extending down though the oculus instead of a sunbeam.  A dusty beautiful space.

An interesting walking destination for all of you so inclined.  And I suggest you hurry, since that historical marker has zero chance of saving these spaces and the rolling fields around them from  vanishing.

[this post pays homage, of course, to both the Walking as Knowing conference, as well as to the even cooler Infiltration, long a personal  favorite.]

I have no idea what’s wrong with The Graduate Employee’s Organization (the TA union at this here university), but apparently at the next general membership meeting (4/13), they’re going to try to write a provision into their bylaws that prohibits the GEO from ever endorsing any political candidates.

I. The membership (”Members”) of the Graduate Employees’ Organization (GEO) may not resolve to formally endorse a candidate for public office. Public office includes a position within city, county, state, or federal government.

And they’re going to try to write a provision into their bylaws that explicitly establishes the right of the GEO to endorse candidates for departmental committees, etc.  (These proposals and the meeting’s agenda are available on-line.)

Is it just me, or is this notably sad?  Someone’s trying to write political passivity into the organization’s bylaws, so that the GEO cannot express the political will of its members, while at the same time emphasizing a right and intent to instead mess around with the academic functioning of departments around campus.

I’m well out of the GEO loop now — but I do hope that this proposal isn’t taken too seriously, and that the organization has not been so disrupted and co-opted that it forever forswears political activism.

Article II of the GEO Constitution notes that one of the core objectives of the GEO is to promote:

Cooperation and Social Justice: To cooperate with other working people on campus and beyond in order to promote social justice.

How does backing out from all forms of local and national politics promote this goal?  Or, now that the election and fair-share dues have been won, has this principle been rendered quaint?

One reason for hostile attitudes towards labor unions in the US is that non-union workers see unions as narrowly self-interested.  A renewed labor movement should  be one that takes a broader perspective on employment, justice, and quality of life issues — not one that is steadfastly determined to ignore the big picture.

I sometimes think about posting only images here.  Here a picture by a lithographer who’s work I love and therefore steal.  Or at least post here without permission.  Every few years I email him about a more beautiful picture I saw him selling once.  Perhaps he has none left to sell, because he never emails me back.

Ok, I’ve been watching zero news lately, so I’m not sure how much tv play this has been getting.  But it’s just now that I’m appreciating the scale of recent cracker-squad vigilanteism along the US-Mexico border:

Scores of participants in the Minuteman Project began assembling late last week and clusters of volunteers began regular patrols Monday, in an exercise some law enforcement authorities and civil rights groups fear will result in vigilante violence. Many of the volunteers were recruited over the Internet, and some planned to be armed.  [. . .]  The volunteers had a limited presence across 23 miles of the San Pedro Valley during the weekend. They spent Monday expanding their line southeast of Naco to watch the border and report any illegal activity to federal agents.

They gathered in groups of three or four spaced out about every quarter mile. Some sat in lawn chairs, others stood scanning the desert with binoculars.

What could be better than a night out with a few of the boys, in the beauty of the desert, kickin’ back with a lawn-chair and an M-16?  And if you get lucky, you just might get to stick that gun the face of somebody who wants some of what you got the hard way.  By being born a white American.