December 30, 2004
The Call of Cthulhu
The Call of Cthulhu: the trailer. I downloaded the cyclopean version and found the most merciful thing in the world is the inability of my merely human mind to correlate all the contents of the dread vistas it opens (via La Petite Claudine).
Blogamy
SondraK and I are pleased to announce our betrothal. This is a polygamous arrangement by virtue of at least two previous blog crushes and, of course, my own devotion to an Australian pop-singer. Now all we need is Elvis...
Mrs. Blog
I cannot quite believe I am reading this early use of the term Blog in a Superman comic so you should just have a look for yourself (via Small Dead Animals).
Blog vacation
I am taking a couple more days away from the computer. There may be some updates so please do check back over the weekend and the Flea will resume normal publication this coming Monday. Depending on my continuing comment-function malfunction I may disable them entirely while I am away from the machine so as to reduce potential silliness.
Happy new year!
Mylo
It is a sad state of affairs when I am taking tips on hipster music from The Telegraph. That said, Mylo is chillin'. There are are couple more Mylo samples here... that Stevie Nicks riff is amazing. And Ministry of Sound is hosting a couple complete Mylo tracks.
Tsunami, cont.
Among the tens of thousands missing or dead are these Britons, including immediate family members of Richard Attenborough. CNN is reporting three-thousand Americans are still missing, placing this calamity on par with September 11, 2001 for loss of life. And, of course, there are the vast majority of the dead whose remains will never be found and whose stories will never properly be told because poverty and circumstance place their lives beyond the sphere of the lucky few who get to spend their morning web-surfing.
The scale of this thing is beyond comprehension. As usual, blogs and "the internet" come closest to capturing what little I can understand.
Corporations give to tsunami relief
International Rescue Committee
Oxfam
Premier clubs help relief fund
Sumankumar's yak pad
Tsunami Disaster in Penang Island
Tsunami Information Resource Page
And I have no idea what to make of this:
"But we're not too worried about staying - we've got a holiday to have."
Making sauce
The Flea's objectification prevention committee chair forwarded news of Victoria University Professor Ralph Pettman's decision to start a "social movement". After much thought on things to worry about, he decided to start a social movement aimed at preventing people from having sex at Mount Everest base camp.
Footprints Tours guide John McKinnon, who has been travelling to Nepal since the 1960s and lived there for two years, said he was astonished at the proposals. He doubted Sherpa were offended by tourists having sex. "I find that claim rather questionable. Sherpas have a very raunchy sense of humour," he said.
Because it's not like there are real problems in south-east Asia at the moment. Perhaps his initiative suffers more from horrible timing than the mere fact of not being a terribly good idea in the first place. Why, I ask in purely rhetorical fashion, is it that so many social movements are aimed at preventing other people from enjoying themselves? This is a good time for me to announce the creation of my own social movement aimed at encouraging people to have sex at the summit of Everest, the 5.5 Mile High Club. Now all I need to do is see if, like Pr. Pettman, I can get a two-thousand dollar grant from my university to fund a website devoted to building support for the idea.
Landstuhl Regional Medical Center
Informed Comment passes on a request - to me, a somewhat shocking request - for help from Lt. Col. Lori Noyes on behalf of the Ramstein Cadet Squadron at Ramstein Air Base, Germany.
The cadets are collecting new clothing and toiletries to that they can take to the wounded at LRMC. Below is a list of items the wounded need. It is cold here in Germany and warm items are needed.
(via Serial Deviant)
Hunter
| You Are a Hunter Soul |
 You are driven and ambitious - totally self motiviated to succeed Actively working to achieve what you want, you are skillful in many areas. You are a natural predator with strong instincts ... and more than a little demanding. You are creative, energetic, and an extremely powerful force. An outdoors person, you like animals and relate to them better than people. Souls you are most compatible with: Seeker Soul and Peacemaker Soul |
A fun quiz though I am somewhat skeptical of the result (via Rue who is a Warrior Soul.
December 29, 2004
Hagbard Celine
- Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson, Illuminatus!
The Streets: The irony of it all
Now is the time at the Flea when we dance.*
*Language, drug use and social commentary warning. Hey, it's The Streets.
Comments update
Hi everybody, we are having technical difficulties with TypeKey so please post comments as usual and they will be in the pending queue until I see them. If all the bells and whistles work properly in the end, I will still want to review comments before publishing them.
I want to thank andúnië for installing MT3 at the Flea. It is a smokin' interface!
Update: Oops! Looks like TypeKey is eating comments as they are not making it as far as my control panel. Sorry for the delay. Nice and quiet here though. Yep.
Update: I have turned off TypeKey for the moment. Comments are still moderated and there will be a delay in previewing as I am going grocery shopping. Woo! Yay!
Tsunami
Update in a new entry: Anyone who cannot wait to express themselves might consider a visit to The South-East Asia Earthquake and Tsunami blog for "News and information about resources, aid, donations and volunteer efforts." The link arrives via Instapundit, who has other tsunami-related charity links (and a useful stinginess update).
Update: Arthur C. Clarke, resident of Sri Lanka, is unharmed.
"Curiously enough, in my first book on Sri Lanka, I had written about another tidal wave reaching the Galle harbour (see Chapter 8 in "The Reefs of Taprobane," 1957). That happened in August 1883, following the eruption of Krakatoa in roughly the same part of the Indian Ocean."
I am still waiting for news of a friend with a home in Thailand. It was an odd experience to run down a mental checklist of people I know who are in the area at least some of the time. I also want to say hello to the lone Flea-reader in the Cocos Islands. News reports suggest the swell was only a half-metre by the time it got that far though with low-lying islands I am not certain how much of a problem something slightly higher might have been. God bless.
Hamster
My hamster got 499cm before running off the track.
Update: I am not terribly video-game adept but this one was pretty easy for me. Not so for Jay Currie.
Stellar geography
This stellar geography of the Babylon 5 galaxy should come in handy.
Oou: The Insane Language
Sonja Elen Kisa designed Oou, a language intended to, amongst other things, produce an "alienating, intoxicated effect." This and so much more can be explored at Sonja's Linguistic Surrealscape including 1-2-3 Cthulhu!, a streamlined rule-system for Call of Cthulhu and a guide to Speak Klingon Like a Restless Native (via Variaciones en re menor).
Elf-shot
A young brother and sister discovered a "strangely shaped" stone on Arthur’s Seat identified as a Bronze Age arrowhead. Good thing they had not wandered into an Alan Garner story.
Alan Saville, Senior Curator of Earliest Prehistory at the National Museums of Scotland, said: "This arrowhead helps to throw light on the importance of the Arthur’s Seat area for Bronze Age settlement."
Pastoral
Few people are more suspicious of anthropology and anthropological rhetoric than I am but it sounds as though a traditional curator or two among all the First Nations' perspectives would not have gone amiss at the Museum of the American Indian. The New York Times comments on "an astonishing uniformity in the exhibits' accounts of religious beliefs" and "a kind of warm, earthy mysticism with comforting homilies behind every facade, reviving an old pastoral romance about the Indian."
But the museum almost seems afraid of distinctions. There are display cases of objects made with beads, organized with no particular logic; a beaded horse-head cover from 1900 North Dakota appears near a mid-19th-century sea-otter hat from the Aleutian Islands. One wall holds ''star'' objects, whose only connection is that they have pictures of stars on them. Some tribes are asked to present 10 crucial moments in their history; the Tohono Oodham in Arizona choose, as their first, ''Birds teach people to call for rain.'' Their last is in the year 2000, a ''desert walk for health.''
December 28, 2004
Malaysian Pop Idol
Something light-hearted from a part of the world in trouble. Malaysian Pop Idol may offer an astoundingly bad (if obviously heartfelt) Kylie cover but still looks more entertaining than the Canadian version.
Qoo
I shall not rest until I have found a local Qoo supply. I want to try the "blue" flavour which is white grape, apparently. So Xiaxue got a Japanese bottle but I think the HK Qoo site is much cooler (Qooler... sorry).
Witches
I am not certain the earliest representation of witchcraft in Europe qualifies as objectification but the term "porno-erotic" is certainly suggestive.
The 13th-century mural was discovered four years ago at Massa Marittima, a town south-west of Siena. Dr Ferzoco believes it was intended as a warning, by supporters of the papacy, of the anarchy and licentiousness that would supposedly engulf the town if it fell into the hands of their political rivals.
The Guardian is peculiarly reticent to show us this groundbreaking representation and I had to look elsewhere for the witches in question.
WTF
Sort of like having a comments section but with Christmas lights (via Raymi) (Also, and sorry to be pointlessly critical in a nsfw aside, but argyle socks? Seriously.).
Traditional definition of marriage
To paraphrase Voltaire's quip, the state-sanctioned serial monogamy license some folks are at the barricades to defend is neither traditional nor definitive nor a marriage. Mark Steyn continues to try to change the subject from gay marriage to polygamy, this time arguing the following.
Logically, one can be either opposed to both (as I am) or in favour of both, but activists who maintain that homosexual marriage is fine but multi-sexual marriage isn't sound awfully like those couples who build their dream home in the country and then want to stop anybody else from moving in.
There is no logical contradiction in favouring monogamy and opposing polygamy any more than there is a logical contradiction in, say, favouring "heterosexual" marriage whether it be monogamous or polygamous and opposing gay marriage in general. Mr. Steyn fails to consider the inevitable gay polygamous marriage lobby when he repeats this latest ostensibly witty foray against other people having access to the same entitlements Steyn takes for granted. No taxation without representation indeed. Every gay person paying taxes in several countries is helping to support Steyn's lifestyle and his silly essay suggests he is not even aware of, let alone grateful for, the fact.
Here is an argument that enjoys no logical contradiction: get the government out of the marriage business entirely. This way we can stop pretending a marriage sanctioned by the Catholic church, a Protestant revival tent or a Vegas Elvis impersonator are the same thing. But that would be to address the real problem of single folk having to pay to sanction the relationships of some couples and would miss Steyn's not terribly well hidden agenda of continuing to pretend gay people do not exist.
December 27, 2004
test post
Testing upgrade to MT 3.14.
Fingers crossed? Check.
Commencing...
Update: Things appear to be working smoothly. But: If you leave a comment, it will not appear immediately. Right now the MT comment settings are at "moderated" which means Mr Packwood (not me, I'm his worker mouse) must approve comments before they will appear on the public site.
This is not the final shape of things; expect further news on the state of commenting here at the Flea by week's end.
December 25, 2004
Sinterklaas
Now is the time at the Flea when we dance.*
*And if you think Dutch Christmas is odd check out the Bavarian version.
Star Wars Holiday Special
Scenes from that notorious Star Wars Holiday Special arrive courtesy of "the internet". I could not get the film to run but you may have more luck than I did.
Christmas in R'lyeh
Dodgeblogium speculates on Christmas at the Cratchitts (and surely that's Chra'chtts or some such).
December 23, 2004
Kylie Minogue 2005
Once again 2005 finds Kylie Minogue smart, popular and pretty (with a hat tip to an eagle-eyed Flea-reader!).
Chrismakkuh
Happy Chrismahanukwanzakah to Flea-readers everywhere (though my family are celebrating the more traditional Chrismakkuh). The Flea will return next week after a few days of holiday... I mean... it's not like I need to blog all the time. It the nervous tick comes back I may take a small hit and post one or two things here or in my guest-blogging gig at The Jawa Report.
The Beatles
The Beatles had Christmas records?
Tardis Tennis
The Hand of Munger suggests I have to link to him if he links to something like Tardis Tennis. Yep. Pretty much.
The Maze
Entrance to the Maze.
Like all others they think the Maze was made for them; actually, it is the other way around. They think I am some poet who will lead them through the symbols and spaces of this Underworld. They think I will teach them lessons. They should call me Cerberus...I am the lesson.
Southpark Ray 2
Southpark Ray, Part 2: "More guns - Still no Kenny". A great follow-up to Southpark Ray though this game/interactive story comes with an extreme violence warning. Not even remotely safe for work! My score:
Just like Mike, you work for Pete. You do as your told, you do it right, and you go along with anything else that presents itself. Your a bit of a worrier and you dont expose yourself to danger, but you figure why should you? Let somebody else do it. So apart from the cheesy clothes, annoying voice, and wierd looking facial hair, Your just like Mike! This is the third best rank.
Capezios
Oh man, I forgot I owned these things. Capezios: the 80s in shoe-form (via Protein Wisdom by way of INDC Journal).
Guldgubber
Eleven "guldgubber" golden reliefs, and the possibility of many more, have been unearthed at an archaeological dig somewhere in eastern Norway.
They date from 600-700 AD, are only about 1.1 centimeters in size and are believed to have been used as a form of payment or offering at rituals. The last ones found in Norway were unearthed at Borg on Lofoten in the 1980s
These guldgubber cufflinks are nice too.
December 22, 2004
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Now is the time at the Flea when we dance.*
*And drink mead. Tyr has some great visual pointers here for Hand of Vecna, my hypothetical Viking metal band of the future.
Unreal estate
A gamer spent $26,500 (£13,700) on an some virtual real estate.
Entropia allows gamers to buy and sell virtual items using real cash, while fans of other titles often use auction site eBay to sell their virtual wares. Earlier this year economists calculated that these massively multi-player online role-playing games (MMORPGs) have a gross economic impact equivalent to the GDP of the African nation of Namibia.
Fylingdale Top
What may be the world's oldest landscape painting has been discovered after a moorlands fire by RAF Flyingdales.
"It turns out to be an astonishing archaeological landscape," said Nick Redfern, regional inspector of ancient monuments for English Heritage, who was left open-mouthed when the hidden treasures of Fylingdale Top were revealed, near the Anglo-American Star Wars defence base.
December 21, 2004
The Yellow Sign
- Robert W. Chambers, "The Yellow Sign" (1895)
Berzerker
Berzerker makes me very happy. I loved those old Vectrex graphics and Tempest was the one arcade game where I kicked ass.
Smeagol
What made Gollum mad?
Daisy Duke
How did I not know Jessica Simpson was to star as Daisy Duke in the new Dukes of Hazzard movie? This is inspired casting.
Pillow Fight II
Once again I am forced to ask, objectification and marketing: is there a relationship? This Miller Lite bikini pillow fight ad features Pamela Anderson. Now she has American citizenship does this still count as Canadian content?
Update: And to any finger-pointing types out there I would like to add a new aspect of the Flea's editorial policy quoted directly from Blue-Eyed Infidel (via SondraK).
Pierced Eyeglasses
These pierced eyeglasses are on my "to do" list for when blogging leaves me wealthy and eccentric.
Kiwami
Honda's hydrogen powered Kiwami concept vehicle might make an excellent Flea-mobile (via Ookii Ne).
Flea Towers
The future Flea Towers will be a co-op. Once the BlogAd revenue kicks in (via Gothamist).
December 20, 2004
Tongue in chic
I found a discounted (the fools!) copy of "Confessions of an Heiress: A Tongue in Chic Peek Behind the Pose" by Nietzschean super-being, Paris Hilton. Who knew the Necronomicon would be packaged in sparkling pink? While I have yet to find the specific section dealing with the evocation of Nyarlathotep, Ms. Hilton does give specific instruction in how to be an heiress. For example, Rule No. 6:
Update: As of the time of this update, "P" is for Paris Hilton.
Double Happiness
If there was a Shanghai Tang in Toronto I could go look at this Double Happiness turtleneck over and over again before deciding, no, I really don't have US$295 for a sweater (via Spirit Fingers).
And then... Hmm. Shanghai Tang does not like pointy links. The sweater can be found in the men's sweater section. Spirit Fingers' post is much more interesting, however, in wondering at this latest plundering of Tibetan culture. Not the Double Happiness sweater, that is, but the "nomadic" fall/winter line as a whole.
Sexual harassment
There is a telling irony that this sexual harassment training video is almost certainly not safe for work. If this is how the HR people mean to address the issue things are worse than I thought. Please tell me this a joke. Please.
(Hat-tip to the Flea's sexual harassment prevention co-ordinator who was probably harassing me by sending it.)
Political
More evidence of the political status of archaeology. This latest agreement between Iran and... wait for it... France also includes a deal to develop hotels. So much for science.
Hierakonpolis
A ceremonial enclosure of the Pharaoh Khasekhemwy, known as "the Fort" (the enclosure and not the pharaoh, that is), at Hierakonpolis is "the oldest freestanding mud-brick monumental structure in the world." It has an even more evocative name, "Shunet es-Zebib", the "Storehouse of the Flies".
Cake, please
Which Eddie Izzard line are you?
brought to you by Quizilla
Via the enigmatic Thesaurus Rex.
December 18, 2004
Evanescence : My Immortal
But though you're still with me
I've been alone all along
- Evanescence, "My Immortal"
Fallen (2003)
Speegle
Still having visions of that skeletal metal foot crushing a human skull as I type the words "Ghost of a flea" into Speegle.
Pillow Fight
Objectification and marketing: is there a relationship? This lingerie pillow fight ad for AViC Cable calls for a critical reading.
Coercive fantasists
The term "coercive fantasists" has now entered my vocabulary.
The trouble with these "coercive fantasists" is that, even if you want to give them what they want, you may not be able to do it - because what they want may not be achievable, even if it were not abhorrent.
An interesting point of agreement between ideologies claiming to be Marxist and ideologies claiming to represent the true faith is their tendency to be opposed to the same things whatever the express ontology of their particular coercive fantasy. Drinking, smoking, sex and sexuality, artistic expression and the war on some drugs all come to mind. This suggests to me that the point of adopting a coercive utopian worldview has nothing to do with social justice, Christ, or the spaceships that are coming to rescue us all.
Rather, coercive utopians, whatever their supposed belief-systems, are actually expressing a psychological aversion to the fun they are evidently terrified the rest of us might be having. This explains the peculiar fact of cooperation among coercive fantasists whose utopias are mutually exclusive in formal terms but in lock-step agreement as to their true goal of banning, censoring and condemning the habits of us live-and-let-live types.
Chill out
A Paleolithic flute is being played for the first time since the Ice Age.
The flute was dug up in a cave in the Swabian mountains in south-western Germany, and pieced back together again from 31 fragments.