Submersible aircraft carriers.

More interesting?  This: “6000 intriguing people you want to meet online before you die.”  Reading around it one can only wonder: so, where’s this guy?

I just got chased out of Aroma  by some dude who came in, sat at little table next to me, and sniffled once a minute for fifteen or twenty minutes straight. 

I believe he caused me permanent mental damage.  So now I am stationed next-door in Pekara, where they are playing pretty loud Cat Stevens.  Out of the frying-pan, I suppose . . .

“You’re gonna wind up where you STARTED FROM!“

The island was abandoned in 1974.  Now no one is permitted there.

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Question:

How do we feel about the very common use of the word “random” as an adjective describing non-numerical things?  Is it ok to say that one has some “random” things on one’s desk?  That one’s reading random articles?  Somehow this usage bothers me in formal writing.  I mean, what one means is that these things have been randomly selected; however they themselves are not necessarily random in their organization. 

Am I right here?  Or a misguided language tryant? 

Ru ready?  (Warning! Ads!  Sound! Video!)

A sharp critic once wrote:

The foiling sequence between Hamlet and Laertes begins with the emergence from the amorphous flux of “play” of an assertion of existence, of distinctive, singular identity, which immediately finds its opposing negation, its inverse:

[They play]

HAMLET: One.

LAERTES:                No.

Two words of two characters by virtue of of the proximate opposition constitute a dramatic figure–the conflict that constitutes  drama’s minimal unit.

A perfect little palindrome, as the above critic observes. 

This reminds me of some considerations that I don’t think will fit too neatly into my dissertation, if only because I’m not sure about MLA format for citing video games.  I try not to play video games too much, for obvious reasons.  (Ok, I did play Civilization V for 3 or 4 days straight, after my brother gave it to me for X-mas (my French Confucian police state dominated the globe!)).  While with my old computer I would sometimes play a little old school Unreal Tournament, with my new one I play the also old school first person shooter, Halo. 

I play only the free “trial version” of the game (you can download it here), which means that there is no long ongoing campaign to play every night.  It means that using Halo I play only 15 minute games against other on-line humans.  There is only one environment in which to fight in the trial version of Halo: Blood Gulch—an environment that presents the quintessence of virtual combat.  A simple box canyon containing two bunkers, one at either end.  Two teams fight in this canyon, each guarding its bunker and the flag it contains.  That’s it.  The environment is stark and spare, and the action smooth.    One can spend quite some time learning to use the terrain and weaponry to be found in this canyon.  The odd purity of this particular fighting arena has made it a sort of cultural icon—awkawrds copies copies of it made for to newer first person shooters, but even (and bizarrely) for games like Starcraft.

The spare perfection of Blood Gulch seems to replicate what our Shakespeare critics above called “drama’s minimal unit”—one/no; be/not.  It all gets rather existential.  Which is, I guess picked up on in Red vs. Blue.  And odd and very popular comedic series that uses the Halo the video game to tell stories.  Have you ever watched it?  It’s funny how Hamletian the whole thing gets.  The lonely meditations on meaning and violence in a world that’s both creepily violent and inexorably funny in that fact that its a game.

Take a look at episode 1.  Or, if that’s not Denmarky enough, try this one. 

Does Red Vs. Blue mean to refer to Hamlet?  Maybe.  Or do these similarities result from the fact that both these stories are playing adopting similar reductio ad absurdum  strategies in considering life and meaning (ones to which the Elizabethans returned again and again in the revenge tragedy tradition)?  Or do they both articulate cultural assumptions that that stretch aways far back into time? 

All these options seem pretty persuasive–the last one perhaps especially when you think about the gender dynamics of Hamlet and Halo.  How in Hamlet Ophelia and Gertrude serve in the play as a kind of sexually threatening backdrop representing the universe itself, and how Halo’s world (to state the obvious) consists of a small ferocious group of tiny armored men fighting it out forever in the indifferent confines of the vast blood gulch.

It’s been quiet here at TDQ the last few weeks.  I’ve been busy, and a bit annoyed at Vizaweb, my hosts, since in the first couple weeks of February the site was down almost 8% of the time.  But things seem to be working better now, and I think that posting an item or two every day or three is probably a healthy exercise.  I’ll perhaps try posting a little more for a while.  We’ll see.

Oh, it’s Valentine’s Day.  Even the fact that St. Valentine is the patron of Beekeepers does not protect him from my ire for lending his name to this wretched day!  Bah.  Anyone know where I can find some good Jajang noodles around here?

An atomic  explosion?

Still no time for Blogging, really.  But I’m sitting here at the ‘ole Esquire reading about the Spanish Armada, while the ususal crowd of regulars behind me debates loudly about the true definition of a coneydog.

Anyway, I’m just now reading about the English fleet that (sort of) defeated the Spanish Armada in 1588.  Not all its commanders had illustrious histories:

Nor were the past records of some of the privateers particularly inspiring.  Two of the strongest galleons . . . had departed in 1582 on an expidition to sail to “China and Cathay.”  . . . off the coast of West Africa the fleet got lost.  Its pilot, Mr. Thomas Hood, who depreciated the use of books on navigation, declared, “[I] will not give a fart for all their cosmography, for [I] can tell more than all the cosmogrpahers in the world.”  His confidence proved misplaced.  Having inadvertantly sailed in a circle back to where it started, the expidition had to sell one of its supporting ships in exchange for new provisions and better directions.  The ramshackle fleet next sailed for South America and . . . ran into a flotilla under Diego Flores de Valdes.  Although the English managed to sink one of the Spanish ships, the action had to be terminated because the crew of the Leicester became too drunk to fight.  The damaged ship had to return to England.  Another ship belonging to Sir Francis Drake and commanded by his nephew ran aground on the coast of South America, where John Drake and his hapless crew were either captured by the Spanards, enslaved, or eaten by cannibals.

It was a good thing for the English in 1588 that they had the weather on their side.

No time to blog now, really.  But I thought I’d direct your attention to this brilliant idea.

A test post of a largish image, using Flickr.

This picture depicts the highest balcony of the Graduate Library at UIUC.  On the library’s last day, when the last word of the last book and document has been scanned—on that day, when our every thought will appear to us already stored and indexed and tagged—the ghost from the bottom of the library will appear on this balcony to utter across a vast crowd gathered below the last undigitized word.  Then the library will fall into the sea.

Ok, so I admit I didn’t catch Bush’s state of the union address.  “Why bother?” I wondered.  However, I’ve just found an online copy of the speech now, and it turns out to have been a much better and  more forthcoming speech than I’d anticipated.