Sewers of Babel : kerinth

The toplink leads to a sequence of 787 cliparts used as individual frames in an animation. The human figure here moves in constant contortion while transforming from male to female, from a tennis player to a soldier to a mother and son. The animation with varying color and border reminds me a little of the Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds section of The Yellow Submarine, albeit without the music.

The creator of the animation has some other interesting items on his site, some of it quite bizarre.

Case in point: a music video composed of videos of wrestlers pointallized nearly to abstraction, exuding wave-like energies. Dropkick

Tony Blair

Josef Stalin

It's hard for me to not hate
When I'm on myspace -
I never see my face
In your top eight!

This is not an LOL-matter.

William James from a lecture in the Pragmatism series, entitled Pragmatism and Common Sense. The magic-element of empirical method beyond observable common sense is shown here to eventually bring the two methods to a conflict. It also is brave enough to challenge the intrinsic positivity of progress with the weak human constitution. I respect that:

But the scientific tendency in critical thought, tho inspired at first by purely intellectual motives, has opened an entirely unexpected range of practical utilities to our astonished view. Galileo gave us accurate clocks and accurate artillery-practice; the chemists flood us with new medicines and dye-stuffs; Ampere and Faraday have endowed us with the New York subway and with Marconi telegrams. The hypothetical things that such men have invented, defined as they have defined them, are showing an extraordinary fertility in consequences verifiable by sense. Our logic can deduce from them a consequence due under certain conditions, we can then bring about the conditions, and presto, the consequence is there before our eyes. The scope of the practical control of nature newly put into our hand by scientific ways of thinking vastly exceeds the scope of the old control grounded on common sense. Its rate of increase accelerates so that no one can trace the limit; one may even fear that the being of man may be crushed by his own powers, that his fixed nature as an organism may not prove adequate to stand the strain of the ever increasingly tremendous functions, almost divine creative functions, which his intellect will more and more enable him to wield. He may drown in his wealth like a child in a bath-tub, who has turned on the water and who cannot turn it off.

However, I am not sure I sympathize with someone so freely questioning the only structural tenet of our civilization. I may resemble his pose too neatly and feel justified in a lackeyish critique. But perhaps we both just photograph badly.

Devvo is a absurdist caricature of the Chav subculture in the UK [explored in an earlier post] directed by (and possibly created by - it is somewhat unclear) the creator of Salad Fingers. Salad fingers, of course, being an uneasy flash cartoon about rust and "mouth-words" set to Boards of Canada.
Not sure how the two relate. But Devvo is like Ali G with pathos, or a more self-destructive streak of absurdity.
He also has a mypace music page with his DJ Shady PieZ.

via [monkeyfilter]

Finally, the only pic of the creator, David Firth, that I was able to find with a cursory image search.

edited 7/9 12:12:05

Free Access to the public from July 4th to August 4th, in celebration of Project Gutenberg's 35th Birthday

Lots of interesting freely-available texts from different sources, including:

• Mp3 Audio eBook Collection
• Children's eBook Collection
• eMovies Collection
• Poets' Collection

Also includes government docs and localized (non-English languages) databases. Only nineteen days left!

Patiently awaiting the rapture but envious of our unenlightened co-human's interest in the news of the World?

Look no further: RaptureNews puts the news in perspective for the elect, allowing them to view with solemn ecstasy the oncoming apocalypse.
Literally, the rapture is

an event that will take place sometime in the near future. Jesus will come in the air, catch up the Church from the earth, and then return to Heaven with the Church.

But there is a complex tradition of how the rapture will come about, dramatized by the Left Behind series. (For a page-by-page critical dissection of LB, go here). There is enough material apparently in Revelation (and superimposed backward over sections of the Book) to write a trilogy three times over.

But back to RapNews. Because of the vagueness of the prophecy (or, perhaps, its labyrinthine tratdition), there are endless ways to extrapolate the time of its onset. Many of the items are related to the Middle East and particularly Israel (whose enemies are still apparently as religiously evil as they were in Mosaic times), a country defended here by a protestant American (assumption alert!). All in all it makes for an interesting set of lenses to view world events through. I am not quite sure how I feel about people in power seeing through those brimstone-colored glasses, however. It seems that manipulative minds could shape a foriegn policy in the prophetic mode and play upon those elected believers...
Then again, we are not long for this world with its internet anyway. Perhaps a nice narrative would be helpful - at least there is a reason that humans are killing humans. I can only hope that when the time comes I can float off the carnage-strewn field...

A flickr photoset evoking Hokusai's 24 views of Mount Fuji, referenced in an earlier post.

While I can't post any of the photoset here, compare this painting against some of the photos:

Perhaps some parts of our earth are simply sexier than others. At least in SoB's home state we can look to the sky for something grand as a mountain, but fleeting...

via [plep]

Toplink goes to the nytimes article on the July fourth unveiling of a Christian-themed Statue of Liberty. The project is the brainchild of the World Overcomers Outreach Ministries Church [site down due to bandwidth limitations]. They hope to merge the love of country with the love of God by giving Lady Liberty the Ten Commandments Tablet and "jehovah" written across her crown.

The Statue of Liberation Through Christ, as she is called, stands 72 feet tall from the base of her pedestal to the tip of her cross. She was the idea of Mr. Williams, a very successful pastor whose church, World Overcomers, qualifies as mega: it has a school, a bowling alley, a roller rink, a bookstore and, he said, 12,000 members.

This is so egregiously American - almost makes one anticipate the time when the Heisman trophy will carry a copy of the Word of God instead of a football.