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February 07
February 28, 2007
Last Friday night I caught my mom watching “Contact” on TV. If anyone is unfamiliar, Jodie Foster plays a scientist who gets paid to listen to static on a satellite dish, whilst hoping to contact aliens. Excuse me, “higher intelligence.”
She gets a message from extraterrestrials sending her instructions to build a space-transport-vessel/expensive piece of crap, via Hitler video clip. The Government funds the project regardless, but Jodie Foster can’t be an astronaut because she doesn’t believe in god.
Eventually, terrorists blow up the space module and Jodie foster becomes the atheist astronaut on an 18-hour stellarfied space voyage through a wormhole. No one believes her however because her mission lasted about 4 seconds.
I sat through this with my mother, and she kept on making odd comments like, “…wow they screwed her out of that project.” or “This is too strange… it’s a little too science fiction.” It was only after the movie when I finally realized what was really going on, because my mother kept saying, “I really don’t remember that happening… I think I would have remembered that.”
I broke the news to her that “Contact” was indeed a fictional film; and she had just wasted about 3 hours of her life believing something that inevitably wasn’t true. Being sure to remind her that she made the same judgment on a Discovery Channel program on dragons.
Posted by: thepfef in Film | Permalink 7 Comments
February 28, 2007
Jesus.
The image above is by Nina Berman, who won this year’s World Press Photo Awards. The man is former Marine Sgt. Ty Ziegel, who was wounded by a car suicide bomber in 2004. I style myself quite the tough motherfucker, but this photo, along with the rest of the series following Ziegel, made me weep at my desk. Please do check out the series, which is heartbreaking.
(Via Slog.)
Posted by: Deep Trachea in Uncategorized | Permalink 16 Comments
February 28, 2007
There will be much, much more reporting on this in the coming issue of Newspeak, but I wanted to let everyone know that I spoke at length with Chuck Murphy yesterday about the area where Smokebrush currently lives between the Bijou and Colorado bridges next to the traintracks. That area was part of the proposed DADA redevelopment and has been through many plans, but Chuck and Steve Mullens currently own most of the property and just put out a request for proposal for developing the area into a small arts district that will include a lot of really reasonably priced artists studios/homes that will overlook the creek. Here’s the overall VERY GENERAL plan (Colorado Ave. is on the bottom edge of the drawing and Bijou is on the top):
The most exciting thing about the plan is that Chuck and Steve are working with the Smokebrush Foundation and Josh Kempf, grandson of Starr Kempf the great local kinetic sculptor, to install an undetermined number of the sculptures (possibly reproductions) in a kinetic sculpture park that will be located at the narrowest part of the land parcel closest to the Bijou Bridge here:
Again, this is all very preliminary, but because the land is almost entirely privately owned, and because Chuck Murphy gets shit done like almost nobody else in this town, he plans to be “digging holes” (as he put it) by this time next year. Finally, a group of people with a vision that’s going to half long-term cultural benefits for the downtown by celebrating one of our greatest local artists in a place that can be seen by people from the highway and entering on both the Colo and Bijou Bridges.
Next time you see Steve Mullens, Josh Kempf, Chuck Murphy (below) and anyone else who may have been, or will be, involved in this, shake their hands!
Posted by: marinaeckler in Art | Permalink 21 Comments
February 28, 2007
Joel Surnow, the creator of 24, loves torture. He loves it so much that the military has asked him to back off a bit. But Surnow will not be stopped. Right after he created the worst show ever, he made Kiefer torture The Goonies‘ Chunk just to show who’s boss. He’s such a shootin’-from-the-hip conservative badass.
(Via BlogtownPDX.)
Posted by: Deep Trachea in Sleeve of Wizard | Permalink Comments
February 28, 2007
Anyone ever heard of this? Wild stuff! Apparently, these little red berry-like fruits transform the taste of anything you eat afterwards– lime becomes like lime candy, for example. Maybe if I put in a request at Safeway…?
Via www.eatfoo.com.
Posted by: admin in Food and Drink | Permalink 3 Comments
February 28, 2007
Lena Wolff, Visiting Artist
Monday, March 5, 2007, 4 PM
Packard Hall, Room 23, Colorado College
Free and open to the Public.
Slide presentation and artist talk.
Sponsored by the Harold E Berg Fund and the Colorado College Art Department.
Lena Wolff is an interdisciplinary Bay Area artist with an MFA in Printmaking from San Francisco State University. Her current work stems from a folk-art sensibility, merging printmaking, collage and needlework on paper, depicting dark fantastical scenes that recall fairy tales and myths. Wolff is a recent recipient of a grant from the John Anson Kittredge Fund and an artist residency at Blue Mountain Center in upstate New York.
Posted by: Aaron Retka in Uncategorized | Permalink Comments
February 27, 2007
a couple of weeks ago I noted that there is a three-part series on news media on Frontline this month. Tonight - right now in fact - part three of the series is airing, with a real emphasis on Blogging. Might be worth a watch.
Posted by: Non-Prophet in Uncategorized | Permalink 2 Comments
February 27, 2007
BLONDES SOON TO BE EXTINCT
via BBC
Posted by: Brian Arnot in Uncategorized | Permalink Comments
February 27, 2007
and a mutual fund does all the miniscule investing I’ll ever do… and I’m too dumb not to trust them..
It’s time for TP (that’s Thomas Pynchon) again!
I’m on page four hundred something. For a while things were downright interesting - Web Traverse the anarchist dynamiter gets killed by anti-union goons, one of whom later hooks up with WT’s charming daughter more or less against her will. His three sons are leading interesting lives too, though, gradually, getting sucked into revenge for his death. This part of the plot is like a very complicated spiderweb, and so far the only one who has escaped it is Kit, the Yalie, who has headed across the ocean to study quantum physics (or its early 20th century equivalent) in Italy. The other two brothers are having a heck of a time traipsin’ and learnin’. The McMurtryish aspects of all this are tremendously amusing. Oh, and there’s a lovely young woman who, having been raised to absurd intelligence by her father, goes to New York and finds the mother who abandoned her at two, and becomes a part of her magician husband’s family.
In the meantime - we go back to the Chums of Chance (the airship boys). They have somehow stayed more or less the same age over the decade or so the book has covered so far. You realize this is a big hint when somehow, more or less through chance, they get mixed up with time traveling, and time machines, and it’s all Wells meets Einstein for a while, as Pynchon does a riotously funny turn describing what it might be like to attend a time travel convention. Then things get serious. There’s this hint of future global catastrophe, and millions trying to travel back in time to when the Earth was habitable. I am starting to think that this might be the underlying plot to all this.
It has to be something big, because otherwise how do all these stories hang together, anyway? And I must say, Pynchon is a magician to keep me, or anybody, reading, for hundreds, even thousands, of pages, when I’m not even sure of the plot of the book..
Posted by: Non-Prophet in Uncategorized | Permalink 2 Comments
February 27, 2007
Last night, Craigslist founder Craig Newmark was on the Daily Show. NSA hookup jokes aside, Newmark has some great points about regional models, internet populism and the proliferation of the site. Craigslist is one of the biggest sites that hasn’t been sold to a corporate bidder and remains almost entirely a public service in the cities who host it, Colorado Springs beings one of them. So, if you’ve sold a couch, bought a bike, or traded blow for blowjob through them, he’s the guy to thank.
Watch the interview—which is way unfunny; Newmark is a boring geek, for all his good qualities—here.
Posted by: Deep Trachea in Sleeve of Wizard | Permalink Comments
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