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2007-12-20T17:34:00.000+01:00

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New Adress: http://emmineb@blogpot.com

2007-02-12T11:33:00.000+01:00

Update your links and bookmarks to http://emmineb.blogspot.com; see you there!

Run Tonight

2006-11-09T12:50:00.000+01:00

Yes I'm taking to the night,
To the road and to the moon,
To the snow and to the stars,
Into the dark white of that black light,
And all the white wolves and black panthers of the whole world
Can howl at me for all they're worth

WTF?? Bush Getting a Blowjob While Being Assfucked By Göran Persson?!?! (SFW)

2006-11-04T16:23:00.000+01:00

I suppose it's not really what it look like, but it sure looks suspicious...

I had this drafted ready for just before the election, but I forgot since my blogging has been kind of the shelf lately; one of the main reason for me for booting out He Who Decides, this closeness to that Bush.
But but, The Force was with us anyway and The Alliance won anyway! We drank Champagne!! At long last one could scream (pardon my Polish orthograph)"": "UUUUUuuurrahhHH!!!! Na Zdrovjé!!... jezszt sczaun jauw straszcznjè òpiwum...."

Bender On Global Warming: "Good! More Beer For Robots"

2006-07-16T18:44:00.000+02:00

Bender totally rules in this trailer (url) for An Inconvenient Truth:

' "Dont forget to recycle", nya-nya-nya-nya...'

Art or Crap?

2006-06-25T11:16:00.000+02:00

[this post has been updated 060710; scroll down.]

Can pollocking your own sketch be art? are Jackson Pollock's paintings crap? Those questions were tentatively asked in the previous post's comment thread.

Now, this is something that puts the question of what is art squarely:

London, June 17: One of Britain`s most prestigious art galleries put a block of slate on display, topped by a small piece of wood, in the mistaken belief it was a work of art.

The Royal Academy included the chunk of stone and the small bone-shaped wooden stick in its summer exhibition in London.

But the slate was actually a plinth -- a slab on which a pedestal is placed -- and the stick was designed to prop up a sculpture. The sculpture itself -- of a human head -- was nowhere to be seen. [more]

It's hard to think of a question that has been so controversial for so long ago than what is and what ain't art. Indeed, probably nothing has been so disputed so much since modern man first appeared. That, true love between man and woman, and how to best kill your enemies.

-And what's that?

-It's the two warriors fighting for the possesion of the ox, and...

-No, I mean, why did you draw it with three horns? even my three-year old daughter knows an ox has two horns.

-It's a symbolic representation of...

-Yeah, like people are gonna call this "art" if they see this 50,000 years in the future, more like they'll believe it was my daughter or someone like your cousin since that failed trepanation; you draw like shit, about as good as a near-sighted mammoth humping a...

-[sound of skull critically crushed by Aurignacian flint axe].

There are beautiful things in the world. Some say they are inherent in nature, some say it they are interpretations of our minds. I believe that nothing, no object or phenomenon is entirely devoid of beauty, as none is entirly devoid of ugliness.

Beauty can also be found in stuff we make, anything we create. There's just more or less of it in a given thing according to each and one of us.

Art, artisan, artefact, artificial. Those words reflect, to me, something fundamental in human nature. Suddenly, 50 000 to 100 000 years ago, humans started to paint caves, make statues and jewellry, invent things like the bow, the boat, the sewing needle, the fishing net and spread all over the world from Africa, a cultural and technological revolution perhaps bigger than anything ever since, including the one that's been going on in the western world the last few centuries.

I think what happened then is one of the most important devolpment in homo sapiens. Some anthropologists believe it makes people born since merit to be classified in a new sub-species, homo sapiens sapiens.
I don't know. Many have called the "sapiens" a humongous misnommer for legions of reasons, and I pretty much agree it's among other things hubristic, arrogant, naïve, preposterous and pathetic.

I think it'd be better with homo arti[-whatever pig Latin suffix]x2. Man the artisan, working to make artefacts, some of which might be called art, that transform his environment into something artificial.

So, what's your take on this? Art or crap*?

* I got 11 out of 16 on that quiz, fwiw

Update 060710: Damien Hirst has been at it duchamping again; this time it's a shark pickled in formaldhyde: links (via MetaFilter). I also found there a link about my favourite Hirst piece, the one trashed as rubbish by a museum cleaner.

And in the comments thread is the percfect illustration for this post:

Pollock a Sketch!

2006-06-06T13:12:00.000+02:00

Via BoingBoing:

In 2003, Miltos Manetas created used someone else's work to make a site with this fun Flash tool to create your own Jackson Pollock-esque "painting."

I like Pollock.

Im think my first creation, called unimaginately enough "pollockasketch #1", is not that bad:

Politics: Bla Bla. Dance: Yeah!

2006-05-20T10:57:00.000+02:00

Ewa wrote about politics. The thread was a record-breaking 12 posts, but unfortunately it was just the two of us. I wonder if any lurkers followed it, more expressed point of views could had taken it to even more interesting places, though we said a lot of stuff on basic freedoms and netcasted subway overhearing as art or politics, but mostly we talked about dog poo girls.

Another well-known net phenomenon is viral videos*; she posted this dance one, so I replied with that link in the thread:

To put it in a slightly overmetaphorical (beside stating an undercontroversial idea in a underoriginal) way, links and threads are what binds the web.

And what makes a blog a media in its own right is in part the possiblity of commenting, which I consider an integral part of it, like sound is integral to a telly. The replies and discussions of other people can make a post much more than what the original author wrote.

*Beside sites like ifilm, youtube, and videogoogle, you got video blogs like Video Wombat; here's four dance posts on it.

Roads to Nowhere: Thrush Nest

2006-05-10T18:09:00.000+02:00

Two thrushes fly
To their ditchside nest
One flees, the other frozes,
Fledgelings still as statues.
Only the worms in its beak
Are slithering, squirming and writhing.

Roads to Nowhere: Eleven Deers

2006-05-10T17:43:00.000+02:00

Eleven deers
Grazing in a glade
I loom leeward
But my stalkins's too fast
And my steps too loud
No wild wolf patience there
For I hear the call of the road

The Heat is On

2006-04-12T17:02:00.000+02:00

... and the crooked timber (the eponymous blog, that is) is catching fire about
Bjørn Lomborg and his book The Skeptical Environmentalist. First I thought I'd pour some oil on the water on that comment thread, but then, since it's a fire, oil might no be a good idea; so I pour the stuff here instead.

I borrowed it from Peter, which was, if not a global warming denialist, at least very skeptical of the whole thing, whereas I was arguing for the opposite side. After reading it, I thought it was excellent and I agreed with at least 99% of it. I think he has also refined his views after our discussions, and reading Diamonds's Guns, Germs, and Steel . Well, what do you expect between civilised friends?

I made a parabole based on this book about the Greenland Vikings, and how it is plain in hindsight that, faced with the Little Ice Age, they should had either moved or changed their lifestyles.

Framed in our terms, their Greenpeaceniks hippie equivalents would have argued "we cannot continue with our lavish way of life, where every middle-class Viking wastes farmland growing barley for cows and pigs, has two drakkars on the beach, for importing French claret all the way across the Atlantic, and cuts down all the trees to build them. You need 8,3 Greenlands to live like that. We must abandon those extravagances, and instead live in igloos and subsist on sour herring and seals' eyes, or Wotan will strike us down!"

Similarly, the equivalent of the drakkar, timber and wine importers' lobby would say that this whole Fimbula Winter threat was a ploy to increase the Midwinterblot sacrifices, and we know who's eating all that bacon that Wotan doesn't take with him to Valhalla, eh?

It's a shame that such a complex and important question cannot be discussed without that kind of fiery polemics. Recently, I noticed that the Skeptical Environmentalist was on the economic shelf (Qade) of the Stockholm's Library, when they have a whole sub-section with at least a dozen meter of booksheves devoted to the environment (Uh, 'Miljölära'); talk about beeing reminded of CP Snow's The Two Cultures, or rather the n cultures...

Firstly, the Earth climate is not simple at all, and even if its general principles are on the whole grasped by scientists (I highly recommend James Lovelock's Gaïa to get the basics), details and predictions is about as good as guessing. Which doesn't make anybody's opinion on the problems as good as everybody else's, but many seem to think so.

Furthermore, it is highly controversial politicaly as well. We're talking about at minimum hundreds of billions of dollars affected by which policies are chosen, and that kind of money talks very loud indeed.

And in America, there is the "sound science" lobby, which wants to discredit evolution, smoke-induced cancer as so-called "bad science", climate change, on behalf of ideological and/or commercial interests.

On the other hand, the Kyoto Protocol is a at best a mixed (in disfavour of the) blessings. I support it, but I don't want to see it implemented. That sounds like heresy is some ears, where the thinking between those auditory appendices is that ideas are either Good or Evil; chant with us: "Kyoto Good, Exxon Evil".

Emission reduction are probably a very bad way of fighting climate change, even if the mechanism is based on a good princple, tradable emmission permits (and even that is in practice not so good as the Protocol does not implement it fully)

Technology development, specifically development of better and new energy sources, will have a much more effective impact, by order of magnitudes, compared to emission reduction, beside beeing a benefit in itself instead of a cost. That's exactly what the Climate Change Partnership sez it's all about, but I suspect that like Bush's state of the union hydrogen proposal some years sgo, it is just that, hot air for the proclimatomutationist orthodoxy.
Which is why I want the Climate Change Partnership implemented, but I don't support it.
But maybe I should beware of orthodoxs, considering how the other side's zealots have treated Greenpeace founder Patrick Moore as an apostate after he commited nuclear heresy in a WaPo editorial a little over a week ago.

So, what to do? Like most other such grand questions, the best thing is to increase one's knowledge, in a skeptical and open-minded manner, not because you will find a solution, you won't ,(unless you're Nobel stuff), but because increasing the global degree of cumulative knowledge will cool heads.

So, you can chill out by checking, besides all the links above, cool places like for instance the Ergosphere and Real Climate.

Förslag Till SL

2006-03-24T15:15:00.000+01:00

Nyligen var det en undersökning ombord Saltsöbanan. Överhuvudtaget är jag nöjd med den, ändå gav jag bara två av sju som totalbetyg.

Detta på grund av nattrafiken, särskilt under vardagar.

Sista tåget går 0100, och nattbuss 497 0250. Det är mkt gles trafik, men jag kan förstå att resenärsunderlaget inte motiverar tätare trafik.

Det som jag däremot inte förstår, är varför de avgår vid så urbota dumma och olämpliga tidpunkter.

Det är er säkert bekant att krogar stänger vid jämna klockslag, oftast ett eller tre.
Med denna tidtabell innebär det att man är tvungen att bryta upp med sitt sällskap i förtid, även om man är någonstans vid slussen, vilket vi finner mäkta otrevligt.

Alla jag känner som bor längs Saltsjöbanan håller med, och även okända medresenärer man träffar på vägen.

Jag skulle vilja föreslå att tidtabellen ändras, så att sista tåget och nattbussen går tio eller kvart över, och att detta införs åtminstom på prov under sommaren.

Jag ser fram emot er svar,

Emmanuel

A Thousand Drops of Ink, One Drop of Blood

2006-03-19T13:14:00.000+01:00

All kinds of intensely beautiful news photos in the World Press Photo of the Year 2005 contest.

To me, this one was last year's most gripping:

It came second.

I've written a thousand words about the Iraq War before, for instance this,
this, and this.

You can read thousands more at Arms & Influence, Global Guerrillas, Body and Soul, The War in Context, Defense and the National Interest, and Tomdispatch.

This not the last year a picture from Iraq will have the chance to win a news photo competition.

Hello, Hello, How Low: The Paul Anka Cover

2006-03-18T14:37:00.000+01:00

Back in the very early 90's, chances were that when you tuned to MTV, you actually saw a video more often than not. Any teenager skipping classes with any self-respect whatsoever would watch it several hours a day. So, from time to time (I don't remeber it was daily, or weekly, or many reruns they showed), I saw the Coca Cola Report with Christiane Baker, where many videos were aired for the first time. It was one of the lamer shows, which you'd watch whilst zapping around waiting for something better to start on another channel. But I'd rather watch re-runs of it than anything showing on MTV today.
So, one night I saw this video that was kinda cool. They had pom-pom girls in black outifts with a red anarchist 'A' in slo-mo, and the music was some kind of punkish rock. Usually, the best thing with the cocacola report was that you learned as soon as possible which videos to avoid, but it felt I wouldn't mind seeing this one a few more times, though I can't say I was enthralled on the spot.
A couple of months later it was on high rotation, and everybody knew what you called that kind of rockish punk.

Now, many have interpreted this tune. But this one, you just gotta have to listen to, if nothing else because the lyrics are intelligible:

with Windows Media Player,
or, RealPlayer

Light Bubble

2006-03-16T18:16:00.000+01:00

Sometimes I dream I could be a professional inventor; it seems so easy and rewarding when you read a book like The Medici Effect. But then Thomas Edison patented over 600 inventions, and he set a goal to produce one minor invention every ten days and one major one every six months!
I've had a few ideas, and I have a feeling for what it takes to get them, but to realise them is a different matter entirely. I guess he just had more flow than I do.
But then, knowing that people actually patented things like the 'Hijacker Injector' or the 'Toilet Snorkel' makes me feel damn better.

80's Arcade Video Games

2006-03-15T13:06:00.000+01:00

I spend many an hour and many a coin on games like Pac Man, Donkey Kong, 1942, Commando and many others back in the days...

Now they're here. Just press '5' on your keyboard to put a coin in the slot.

Saturn Sounds Spooky

2006-03-13T18:50:00.000+01:00

You know those sci-fi movies where the score is meant to be "eldritch", "eerie", "ethereal", "uncanny", "freaky" or whatnot?

Well, Saturn really does sounds like that, in a way no musician could hope to compose. Listen to what Cassini heard on its way and around Saturn:

Day 207 (10 seconds)

Day 324 (73 seconds)

Day 1268 (28 seconds)

Day 517 (11 seconds)

Day 542 (10 seconds)

For pictures and info for each tune, check here: day 207, day 324, day 1268, day 517, day 542.

Video Surfing

2006-03-11T15:10:00.000+01:00

Norwegian kitchen appliance rock band Hurra Torpedo performs an awesome cover of "Total Eclipse of the Heart".
In blue, bad-fitting 70's tracksuits.

Zen mastery of reverse motion shots: Balancing Point.

A cartoon for kids introducing a world more fantasmagic than Wonderland and zanier than Oz.

How to peel potatoes: put in icy water, cut the skin around, and pull.

By Jove! A jollier version of MK Ultra for our lads in the swinging sixties: LSD tested on British troops.

UPDATE: I've found a couple of nifty sites: if you want to send (or just keep for yourself) a video and not the link, you can save them to your hard disk with KeepVid; then you can mail them (up to 2GB) with skickafilen.se.

Vince goes Europe

2005-10-12T15:01:00.000+02:00

Hurricane Vince is first ever tropical cyclone to reach Europe.

Mermaid Trip

2005-10-07T10:43:00.000+02:00

cyan sky and lavender clouds
sunset like an ochre orange
the music down the road's good
like petroleum purring under a hood
walkin' with cap'n Morgan on an island of desert streets
a short journey to an oasis of liberty
then back on tracks in a night black
as eyes of a thousand and one nights

A door to the future?

2005-09-03T13:02:00.000+02:00

Again, an incredibly nifty Japanese gadget. Watch the video!

On the moon.

2005-08-29T23:32:00.000+02:00

Time flies; when I first started this blog, the moon was full. Now it's a waning crescent. I don't know how it does and does not influence me, but I'm sure people walked on it, and that it wasn't a movie.

Känn ingen sorg för mig Götheborg

2005-08-22T22:19:00.000+02:00

A few days ago I went to Skeppsholmen to see an exhibition. Looking across the water was a quite wondrous sight moored at the Old Town dock: a three-masted East India XVIIIth century merchant-man.
I was really awe-struck until I dimly recalled reading about the Götheborg, but not that she was coming to Stockholm. On my way back home, I walked past her... you've seen them in movies, you've read about them in books, but seeing such a sailship under the rays of a full moon, with the soft purling of the waves and that strong tarry smell...
Aarhh, mebbe I was drunk! Just gimme another bottle'o Rhum, ye wussy landlubbers, so that I might fuggit 'bout that scourging of the Seven Seas... well, at least I've the map of a treasure... aye, a treasure on Animal Garden Island...

Major Scientific Breakthrough Proves "Theory" of Gravitation Wrong

2005-08-21T23:51:00.000+02:00

The Onion reports: Evangelical Scientists Refute Gravity With New 'Intelligent Falling' Theory

It is now just a matter a time before narrow-minded 'scientists' proponing such 'theories' realise that the truth is that the world was intelligently designed by the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

House-warming Open Thread!

2005-08-19T23:24:00.000+02:00

This is my new blog; what do you think? Then, turn on the music and mingle amongst yourselves in the comments!

rope riddle

2001-06-17T15:39:00.000+02:00

terrorism en vogue

2001-01-01T23:47:00.000+01:00

img

2001-01-01T13:58:00.003+01:00