strange radiation: the pool of radiance archive
Adventures with an unreliable narrator.
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Jan 29 04: ahab lives
I…wow. This…this is…
You know, I thought I had seen it all when it came to exploding whale stories. How can you top those folks in Oregon? You know, that time on the beach with the dynamite?
If anything can, this is it. A 60-ton sperm whale corpse blew up on the streets of Tainan today. Spectacular. Granted, they don’t have actual video footage—score one for Oregon—but the photo is still pretty remarkable.
Presumably Dave Barry will have to write another column.
Finally, I’d like to buy whoever wrote MSNBC’s headline a beer. Nice job.
Jan 27 04: dog and superdog
Nietzsche was a Good Dog. She was fun to be with. She loved Scott in that way that every dog should love her boy. She spent a couple years as house dog at Seal and Serpent, back in the day. She was good with Scott and Britton’s daughter River. She was fiercely loyal to her family. (If she thought you were a threat, her bark was utterly terrifying. But she could be dissuaded when necessary.) If she was fond of you, she let you know. She was lovely company.
Nietzsche died suddenly on January 7. We’ll miss her.
good science
File this under Reasons to be Hopeful: the most elegant use of science on behalf of the public good that I’ve heard about in quite some time. Some Danish scientists have turned a weed into a land-mine detector:
The genetically modified weed has been coded to change color when its roots come in contact with nitrogen-dioxide (NO2) evaporating from explosives buried in soil.
Within three to six weeks from being sowed over land mine infested areas the small plant, a Thale Cress, will turn a warning red whenever close to a land mine.
All hail Thale Cress 2.0! Read the whole article. [VIA]
frost heave
Yet another another another day of subfreezing temperatures in New York. Big snow expected for tonight, which in some ways is a good sign because snow weather is warmer than the sort of weather we had a couple of days ago (7°F / -14°C). Interesting, though, to see what all this has done to the sidewalks.
The granite plazas of Midtown are a mess. Not because of the glossy lumps of grimy ice that spatter the little parks like cold sauce on a dirty plate, but because of the unquiet ground beneath them. The smooth expanses of flagstones have been rumpled. They’re full of lumps and troughs and strange ridges just high enough to trip over. They’ve grown spiky with construction pylons and nylon lines marked DANGER. The benches and tables are all subtly askew. Under our feet the soil freezes and thaws and freezes and thaws, creating veins and seams of ice that swell today and then recede tomorrow and on Wednesday will be running in some other direction entirely.
The stone masons and concrete pourers, snug for now in their beds, are dreaming of the spring and the warm and busy days to come.
Jan 20 04: politics and disgust
Ha! You thought this would be about the State of the Union Address. Nope. I just couldn’t do it. I couldn’t! I can’t watch the President speak for more than about thirty-five seconds before I begin to feel the need to leave the room or scream at the television or throw things. I didn’t need that kind of angst tonight. Besides, we already knew the sorts of things he was going to say: war good, faggot marriage bad; terrorism bad, unfunded mandates good; corporate welfare good, assistance to the working poor bad. Oh, and also this new thing he’s on about, “Mars Mars Mars!”
You know. The thing that proves that Dubya has vision, and stuff. The one where we build Moon Base Alpha for trillions of dollars, which somehow gets us to Utopia Planitia on the cheap. The one that may somehow have sucked the funding away from more immediately useful things like Hubble, only that theory is Officially Denied. Right, that one.
Well, as it turns out, the Mars thing didn’t really come up. But I’ve had this simmering away in my head for days now, and I’d like to deliver it anyway. I used to think that the Mars and/or Bust Plan was a bald attempt to distract us from fiscal mismanagement and cronyism and warmongering and the erosion of our civil rights, and nothing more. And now I’ll admit that this was incorrect. It was all of those things…plus yet another opportunity to benefit Halliburton. Well, Halliburton and a number of other corporations that have given money and/or to which the administration has close ties. I know, terribly cynical of me to say any such thing, and it’ll probably get me sent to Guantanamo or at the very least accused of Political Hate Speech—and what on Earth does that mean, anyway?—but I’m not the first to suggest it.
Ugh. How did we get here? How do we make it stop?
Jan 19 04: new toy!
Paul made an investment this weekend. He bought Apple’s new GarageBand application (as part of their new iLife suite). It is unbelievable. And if there’s any karmic justice then Apple will make a skillion dollars off it.
GarageBand is Apple’s new make-your-own-music application. It is basically a huge multitrack music mastering system for total newbies. You can put your own music in via MIDI or analog inputs, or you can pick your favorites from over a thousand little musical snippets that come with the program, representing an immense variety of musical styles from around the world. You can loop things; you can fade in and out; you can twiddle reverb and echo and compression and dozens of things I don’t understand at all yet; you can build the soundtrack to your head, piece by piece, and then send it out into the world. Its interface is typical Apple, by which I mean clean, fairly intuitive, pretty to look at, and easy to use. Very, very cool. At first glance, it seems to be best suited for dance music, but I’m sure that ere long all kinds of folks will start churning out all kinds of stuff that hadn’t been expected. Get yourself a copy and let your mixmastery shine. (Assuming, of course, you’re a Mac user.)
It’s been great watching it take over huge chunks of Paul’s mental bandwidth over the last couple of days. I just knew he’d enjoy it. Mark my words, there is a USB MIDI keyboard in our immediate future.
Actually, it’s likely to foster a revolutionette similar to what apple’s iMovie did for home digital video production: the discovery of an art form’s potential by the great unwashed, followed by everybody and their kids trying their hands at it. So be prepared, because there’s going to be a huge wave of bad homemade dance music posted to the web ere long. I’m delighted by that idea. It also means that there are going to be some weird and exciting and totally new things in there as well. Anything that gets more people to flex their creative birthright in more ways is aces in my book.
As an indication of what can be done with it pretty much straight off the bat, Strange Radiation is proud to host the first efforts of Paul Phillips, DJ: “Chase Music,” (2:02, ~2MB mp3). He wishes it to be known that it’s a first effort, and that he was mostly focusing on mood and effect rather than structure, and he’s not much of a dance-music person really. But I think it’s pretty impressive for somebody who claims all of the above and was discovering the abilities of the tools as he went along. And it’s also fun and charmingly dorky (viz. the voice samples) and I love it. So there. As soon as my own thing is ready I’ll put it up, and in the interest of fair play he can call mine dorky, too, if he likes.
A final aside: if the title of this entry has filled your head with the song stylings of Lene Lovich, I love you.
Jan 15 04: whirlpool
This. I want to do this. I want very much to do this. But the Horror of the Blank Page—the Horror of the Idea of the Blank Page—has had me under its spell for so effing long that I don’t know if I remember how to write any more. There’s a voice in my head saying It doesn’t matter. Just apply. Promise yourself you’ll write two short stories—that you’ll write something—in time for the application deadline, and that you’ll send it in. Just write. It doesn’t matter. Just write.
The sound of that voice had me curled up in a small ball in my office, my forehead sinking slowly through the desk, for a long minute. A second voice assures me that Charybdis sang a song like that, and I don’t know who to trust. The act of putting this into words scares the hell out of me. The idea that I am putting it on the blog for people to see scares me more. I always swore to leave this particular drama out of the blog. What if everything is gone?
I want to be there. I don’t know what I’m going to do next.
UPDATED: Link in paragraph one tweaked so you can tell what I’m talking about more readily.
Jan 11 04: (mala musica)
So the other day at work I was struck dumb with horror by the song stylings of Wing. She is apparently this nice lady of a certain age who emigrated to New Zealand from Hong Kong and started making records. She sings to karaoke tapes, near as we can tell. You can listen to a number of tracks on her site: particularly choice are her Broadway selections (“Memory,” “Don’t Cry For Me, Argentina,” “My Favorite Things”), her Mariah Carey cover (woo), and her turn at “O Mio Babbino Caro.” She quite helpfully notes that the latter is the ‘Italian version.’
However, while playing this stuff for Pablo this evening I had a bit of a change of heart. I mean, sure, it’s bad, don’t get me wrong. But you can also tell that you’re listening to somebody who is coming from a grounding in Chinese musical forms. She hasn’t gotten the idiom down yet.
With that in mind, then IMHO the number one source of true musical horror is still the Shaggs. The Shaggs were three sisters whose father decided that his little girls really, really needed to form a rock band. It was 1968, after all. This sort of thing was happening all over the place. So why shouldn’t it happen to the Wiggin sisters of Freemont, New Hampshire?
Yeah, okay, sure, why not. There was just one teensy problem: the Wiggin sisters of Freemont, New Hampshire couldn’t play their way out of a paper bag. Despite hours of daily practice upstairs in the attic, they pretty much sucked eggs. They played a few local gigs, and recorded a pair of albums. But in the end, they were legendary for all the wrong reasons. Frank Zappa is said to have declared them “better than the Beatles,” but you know Frank. Listen to “My Pal Foot Foot” and judge for yourself. If you dare. (It’s about a cat.) Honestly, this stuff just beggars description.
Finally, just FYI: Much of the world, including me, first found out about the Shaggs and the saga of their strange and/or brilliant career in a fabulous New Yorker article by Susan Orlean (who also wrote The Orchid Thief, which was turned into the movie Adaptation). If you still have any brain cells left after “Foot Foot,” it’s worth reading.
Jan 8 04: cold fish
I don’t really know much about my father’s mother at all. Her name was Esther. She grew up in Minnesota and spoke only Swedish in the home until she started going to school. She met my grandfather Ed in the mountains. In the early 1970s, and presumably before that, she wore killer black-framed cat’s-eye spectacles. And oftentimes, as Christmas drew near, she made lutefisk.
Lutefisk is—well, it’s fish that has been encouraged to rot by prolonged soaking in lye. It is famously stinky and disgusting. It is equally famously beloved by the Swedes. My father goes just a little pale when describing what the presence of lutefisk did to his home. He has never attempted to describe its flavor, but still: there are few things described so vividly by my father and his brothers, where boyhood memories are concerned, as the smell of lutefisk. As a result, the stuff has a semilegendary place in family legend among the Willetts of my generation. There are so few points of specificity.
I was delighted, therefore, to read Clay Shirky’s very funny Ode to Lutefisk today. Granted, Mr. Shirky’s tale is set in Norway, but still: it illuminates the family touchstone nicely.
(An aside re: Clay Shirky. He wrote a few things that I greatly enjoyed back in the days when the web was new and still called the World Wide Web, and Yahoo! could catalog the whole thing using actual humans. One was “This Essay Won’t Fit On Your Screen,” thoughts on the problems and promise of the WWW vis-à-vis nonlinear fiction. I had this shiny new English degree at the time and my mind was freshly blown by Professor Hite’s Postmodernist Fiction class. I loved it. The other was the World’s Worst World Wide Web Page. It’s still terrifying. There are still pages being made that look like it. Shirky’s website hasn’t changed a jot in at least six years and probably longer. It’s a museum piece, but in a good way.)
Anyway: it seems like lutefisk is sort of Scandinavia’s answer to ‘advanced sushi.’ You know, the ones whose little picture on the stand-up card at the restaurant is discreetly marked ‘advanced.’ The cards are made by beer or sake manufacturers; they’re the same everywhere. And you see this innocent little ‘advanced’ under the little photo and you wonder what the hell it means, advanced, how weird can it be, and you realize that you aren’t going to be the one to find out. Instead it was John, in the end, who took the bait. John ordered the uni. This was mere days after we got the Bleecker Street apartment, at a local sushi bar whose name we habitually mistranslated as ‘three round guys.’ It really meant something to the effect of ‘a circle of three.’ Wait. I’m digressing again.
Uni is essentially orange-pulpy-blob-of-sea-urchin with some rice, wrapped in nori. Urchins are remarkably undifferentiated beneath the spines. They’re mostly a big glob of reproductive cells. Yeah, eew. John put the glistening rondel in his mouth and there was a long pause; and then I watched his face attempt to crawl off the surface of his skull. I am told that uni tastes like something somebody scraped off the underside of a pier, but I myself will never know.
(Yet another aside: European friends of ours who have yet to lose their sushi virginity are hereby reassured that we will never slip them ‘advanced’ sushi for our own amusement. And that this story is not sufficient excuse for declining a little hamachi negi when next we see them. Maybe some unagi. Or a spicy tuna roll. Mmmm.)
Lutefisk is apparently the same, only it tastes more Norwegian. Or more Swedish. Like something you dredged up from the bottom of a fjörd, maybe.
It probably depends on the grandmother.
Jan 5 04: the claw!
This just in off the Associated Press newswire: strange doings in Sheboygan. I’d have made this a Quark—you know, strange and/or charming—but for two factors: the first is Neil Gaiman’s take on the story, which is how I found it in the first place…
…[this] is a wonderful news story, and makes me wonder which genre the boy lives in. I mean, mysteriously getting into one of those toy-crane places means different things to someone in a horror story than it would to someone in a light and fluffy comedy or a medical drama. Right now it’s almost a locked room mystery.
The second factor is that I couldn’t let it pass without noting that the Duluth News Tribune has filed the story under “politics.” Your witty rationalizations thereof are welcome in the comments line.
Jan 4 04: Emily? Is that you?
File under The things you find on eBay these days: an account of a most unusual purchase, entitled “How I Met and Dated Miss Emily Dickinson: An Adventure on eBay,” by Philip F. Gura. I would have made this a Quark, but couldn’t come up with a pithy enough link title that I could be sure that folks would follow it. And it’s an interesting tale. [via]
n.b. The article cannot be sung to the tune of “The Yellow Rose of Texas,” alas.
second helping
The Carp Story is available online again at the Times, because it was one of the Times’ most e-mailed stories of the year. I don’t know for how long it’ll be available. If you haven’t read it, then you should—you have to register, but it’s free and you don’t have to actually provide any true information about yourself. And besides, I’m linking to stuff on that site all the time and you might as well get it over with.
Anyway, the tale runs that a carp about to be butchered at a Hasidic fishmonger’s in Rockland County began loudly prophesying in Hebrew. Was it a hoax? Who can say? I kind of hope not—I think the world needs more aggressive weirdness in this vein. Well, the ‘end of the world is nigh’ part I could do without, I suppose. But definitely more talking fish.
My favorite part of the story is that eventually they butchered the carp and sold it for gefilte fish. Now that’s an ending.
Jan 3 04: oh-four: take two
I am resisting the urge to spoil the beginning of this fine new year. I am turning away from the temptation to add to the sum of the world’s anger. I defy the impulse to fill the world with vengeance and spite instead of forgiveness and love. I am hanging on by my fingernails. I would love to curse you, whoever you are. I suppressed my flickering fantasies of committing horrible violence upon your person, preferably involving long and vicious blades, as I stomped back to the subway yesterday afternoon. I rejected the urge to dream up an agent of karmic retribution; to throw it upon the trail of your benighted soul by showing it the shards of my now-worthless credit cards.
Yesterday you stole my wallet out of the locker at the gym, but I will not hate. You emptied it of its cash and left it at the other end of the building by the service elevators, but I will not hate. You cost me fifty bucks and drove me to cancel my credit and ATM cards and it will take me days to get new ones, but I will not hate.
Every day is a blank canvas. Every day is a new year’s first turning. Every day is a chance to make the world more like it should be. The world is too full of darkness as it is. I will not hate.
(Goatfucker.)
I will not hate.
Jan 1 04: alpha
It’s 2004! The fireworks are long over; we have gathered the streamers from their tangled drifts beneath the chairs and washed the many drinking vessels. Now we brush our teeth. Soon, very soon: to bed.
Happy new year to one and all.