"The RFID chip will trip an alarm that will instantly alert the staff." (Image by Jessica F.)
Swiping towels at check-out time just got tougher as hotels have begun embedding in their linen radio-frequency chips that sound an alarm if the items are removed from the premises. FromEndgadget:
“For many travelers, stealing hotel towels or bathrobes is more pastime than petty crime. Hotels, on the other hand, apparently take it more seriously. So seriously, in fact, that some have begun embedding specially crafted RFID tags within their linens, just to help us avoid ‘accidentally’ stuffing them in our suitcases before heading to the check-out desk. The chips, designed by Miami-based Linen Technology Tracking, can be sewn directly into towels, bathrobes or bed sheets, and can reportedly withstand up to 300 wash cycles. If a tagged item ever leaves a hotel’s premises, the RFID chip will trip an alarm that will instantly alert the staff, and comprehensively humiliate the guilty party.”
Water bubbles that are carbon neutral. (Image by Eriikson Architects.)
Buckminster Fuller famously designed unorthodox, environmentally friendly edifices and automobiles that were rarely realized. Finnish architects Eriiksson are, however, currently making a Fuller-esque vision come to fruition, creating an eco-city outside of Beijing from a cluster of geodesic domes that marries futurism to a sustainable future. An excerpt from Inhabit.com:
“The Miaofeng mountain area, located about 30 km west of Beijing, is slated to be reborn as a gorgeous new ‘Ecological Silicon Valley.’ Located close to the urban metropolis of Beijing, the new city will combine research institutes for modern science and innovation with environmentally friendly and eco-efficient urban living. The master plan for the eco-city was laid out by the Finnish firm, Eriksson Architects in collaboration with Finnish ecological expertsEero Paloheimo Eco City Ltd. With goals of carbon neutrality, respect for the environment, water and energy conservation, renewable energy, and housing and amenities for all employees and visitors, the Mentougou Eco Valley aims to reduce its environmental footprint to one third that of a typical city of similar size.”
The two basic topics which fascinate me are “What is reality?” and “What constitutes the authentic human being?” Over the twenty-seven years in which I have published novels and stories I have investigated these two interrelated topics over and over again. I consider them important topics. What are we? What is it which surrounds us, that we call the not-me, or the empirical or phenomenal world?
In 1951, when I sold my first story, I had no idea that such fundamental issues could be pursued in the science fiction field. I began to pursue them unconsciously. My first story had to do with a dog who imagined that the garbagemen who came every Friday morning were stealing valuable food which the family had carefully stored away in a safe metal container. Every day, members of the family carried out paper sacks of nice ripe food, stuffed them into the metal container, shut the lid tightly—and when the container was full, these dreadful-looking creatures came and stole everything but the can.
Finally, in the story, the dog begins to imagine that someday the garbagemen will eat the people in the house, as well as stealing their food. Of course, the dog is wrong about this. We all know that garbagemen do not eat people. But the dog’s extrapolation was in a sense logical—given the facts at his disposal. The story was about a real dog, and I used to watch him and try to get inside his head and imagine how he saw the world. Certainly, I decided, that dog sees the world quite differently than I do, or any humans do. And then I began to think, Maybe each human being lives in a unique world, a private world, a world different from those inhabited and experienced by all other humans. And that led me wonder, If reality differs from person to person, can we speak of reality singular, or shouldn’t we really be talking about plural realities? And if there are plural realities, are some more true (more real) than others? What about the world of a schizophrenic? Maybe, it’s as real as our world. Maybe we cannot say that we are in touch with reality and he is not, but should instead say, His reality is so different from ours that he can’t explain his to us, and we can’t explain ours to him. The problem, then, is that if subjective worlds are experienced too differently, there occurs a breakdown of communication… and there is the real illness.•
"We do it the WTF (What The Fuck) way!" (Image by Paul E. Reynolds.)
Promote Your Business On MISSILES – BLOW THEIR F*&KEN MIND OFF!! (Bay Shore)
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We have the largest collection of Fighter Jet Cockpits and Missiles all mobile on trailers – We do it with the WOW effect. Check it out – you will be surprised – I guarantee it!
Jerry Rubin had morphed from Yippie to Yuppie by the time he was struck by a car and killed in 1994 while jaywalking near UCLA. Here he is in all his mad glory in 1970, sassing Phil Donahue.
"The members, who adopt handles 'Berkeley Blue' (Steve Jobs) and 'Oak Toebark' (Steve Wozniak), later go on to found Apple Computer." (Image by rebelpilot.)
In 2000, Robert Trigaux of the St. Petersburg Times put together a timeline of communications hackers, who apparently began to do their voodoo the second the telephone was invented. An excerpt:
“Hacking has been around for more than a century. In the 1870s, several teenagers were flung off the country’s brand new phone system by enraged authorities. Here’s a peek at how busy hackers have been in the past 35 years.
Early 1960s
University facilities with huge mainframe computers, like MIT’s artificial intelligence lab, become staging grounds for hackers. At first, ‘hacker’ was a positive term for a person with a mastery of computers who could push programs beyond what they were designed to do.
Early 1970s
John Draper makes a long-distance call for free by blowing a precise tone into a telephone that tells the phone system to open a line. Draper discovered the whistle as a give-away in a box of children’s cereal. Draper, who later earns the handle ‘Captain Crunch,’ is arrested repeatedly for phone tampering throughout the 1970s.
Yippie social movement starts YIPL/TAP (Youth International Party Line/Technical Assistance Program) magazine to help phone hackers (called “phreaks”) make free long-distance calls.
Two members of California’s Homebrew Computer Club begin making ‘blue boxes,’ devices used to hack into the phone system. The members, who adopt handles ‘Berkeley Blue’ (Steve Jobs) and ‘Oak Toebark’ (Steve Wozniak), later go on to found Apple Computer.”
From Aaron Saenz on Singularity Hub: ” In a quest to bring high-quality digital maps to every corner of the globe, Google producedMap Maker, a crowd-sourced cartography project that allows users to fill in the blanks on Google’s digital atlas of the world. With Map Maker, Google claims that the amount of the Earth’s population with detailed online maps of their regions went from 15% to 30% (with 187 nations and territories included). Now, Google is bringing Map Maker to the US, with an emphasis on making the existing digital maps better and more detailed. Make an improvement to Google’s maps, and it could be seen by billions of users around the world.”
David Owen’s excellent 2004 New Yorker article, “Green Manhattan,” convinced the masses of something that many urban planners already knew: Large cities are more environmentally sound than suburban and rural areas. It’s common knowledge now, but it was contrary to the prevailing wisdom just a few years ago. An excerpt:
“My wife and I got married right out of college, in 1978. We were young and naïve and unashamedly idealistic, and we decided to make our first home in a utopian environmentalist community in New York State. For seven years, we lived, quite contentedly, in circumstances that would strike most Americans as austere in the extreme: our living space measured just seven hundred square feet, and we didn’t have a dishwasher, a garbage disposal, a lawn, or a car. We did our grocery shopping on foot,and when we needed to travel longer distances we used public transportation. Because space at home was scarce, we seldom acquired new possessions of significant size. Our electric bills worked out to about a dollar a day.The utopian community was Manhattan. (Our apartment was on Sixty-ninth Street, between Second and Third.) Most Americans, including most New Yorkers, think of New York City as an ecological nightmare, a wasteland of concrete and garbage and diesel fumes and traffic jams, but in comparison with the rest of America it’s a model of environmental responsibility. By the most significant measures, New York is the greenest community in the United States, and one of the greenest cities in the world. The most devastating damage humans have done to the environment has arisen from the heedless burning of fossil fuels, a category in which New Yorkers are practically prehistoric. The Average Manhattanite consumes gasoline at a rate that the country as a whole hasn’t matched since the mid-nineteen-twenties, when the most widely owned car in the United States was the Ford Model T. Eighty-two per cent of Manhattan residents travel to work by public transit, by bicycle, or on foot. That’s ten times the rate for Americans in general, and eight times the rate for residents of Los Angeles County. New York City is more populous than all but eleven states; if it were granted statehood, it would rank fifty first in per-capita energy use.”
••••••••••
David Owen speaks to NYC’s environmentally sound nature:
Sports Phone jingle: "Get all the sports news instantly, dial 9-7-6-1-3-1-3." (Image by Holger.Ellgaard.)
Information is instant now, but for roughly a decade before the advent of cable TV, sports-talk radio and the Internet, New Yorkers routinely called an outfit named Sports Phone and paid a dime to hear updated recorded messages from fast-talking announcers with nicknames like King Wally, who could jam all the latest scores and news into a one-minute call. The company, which received updates from a collection of stringers, was an especially important tool for gamblers. Other cities had similar services.
It wasn’t just sports. Information of different kinds, now disseminated by the Internet, was available via the phone: weather, soap opera updates and pornographic messages. In 1983, Sports Illustratedpublished a piece about Sports Phone, providing no hint that the whole empire was about to crumble. An excerpt:
“In 57 seconds, Rickey Henderson can circle the bases a couple of times and Howard Cosell can just about get through half a sentence. Fifty-seven seconds is roughly the time unit into which two telephone sports information services sausage the entire major league baseball scoreboard, the results of a couple of tennis matches, the latest on who George Steinbrenner got from whom and occasional micro-mini-interviews. Fifty-seven seconds is what you get when you call from home or put a dime into a pay phone and dial one of three regional Sports Phone franchises. For half a buck you can call Dial-It, the only national service, from anywhere in the country and get a 59-second slice of sports.
Sports Phone and Dial-It have boiled the sports world down into 57 and 59 seconds because the FCC measures message units in 60-second intervals. Both services lop off a few seconds to give the caller time to hang up. And though compressed, the format has been a tremendous success, for both Ma Bell and the two services.New York’s Sports Phone received 40 million calls last year. The Pennsylvania-based Dial-It draws about 350,000 calls a week from across the nation. On one football Sunday last October, Dial-It got about 130,000 calls.”
“The Real Dr. Frankenstein” reprints strange, old newspaper articles that were originally published in the Westphalia Times of Kansas during the 1880s. They focus on the odd doings of a Dr. Franckinstein, an apparent quack who was secretly working as a bootlegger. An excerpt:
“Dec 17, 1885
Dr. Franckinstein showed us Tuesday, pieces of a frog or snake which he removed from one of his lady patients’ stomachs. The head, like that of a small snake, was lost through carelessness. The doctor thinks there are more such living creatures in the woman’s body, caused by drinking pond water some years ago, when she swallowed some eggs. She has been in poor health some years, doubtless caused by these reptiles being in her body. They can be seen at his drugstore.
December 24, 1885
The doctor informs us his patient is progressing, having discharged great quantities of the remains of dead animals, or animalcule or frogs, lizards, etc.”
An excerpt from “Obama’s Young Mother Abroad,” Janny Scott’s detailed Sunday Times Magazine piece about Stanley Ann Dunham, who lived an unorthodox and all-too-brief life and was mom to our 44th President:
“To describe Dunham as a white woman from Kansas turns out to be about as illuminating as describing her son as a politician who likes golf. Intentionally or not, the label obscures an extraordinary story — of a girl with a boy’s name who grew up in the years before the women’s movement, the pill and the antiwar movement; who married an African at a time when nearly two dozen states still had laws against interracial marriage; who, at 24, moved to Jakarta with her son in the waning days of an anticommunist bloodbath in which hundreds of thousands of Indonesians were slaughtered; who lived more than half her adult life in a place barely known to most Americans, in the country with the largest Muslim population in the world; who spent years working in villages where a lone Western woman was a rarity; who immersed herself in the study of blacksmithing, a craft long practiced exclusively by men; who, as a working and mostly single mother, brought up two biracial children; who believed her son in particular had the potential to be great; who raised him to be, as he has put it jokingly, a combination of Albert Einstein, Mahatma Gandhi and Harry Belafonte; and then died at 52, never knowing who or what he would become.”
"Trying to get back into my craft." (Image by fictures.)
Wanted: Wig making tools (Brooklyn/NY)
In need of any and all wig making tools and/or supplies. Trying to get back into my craft but in need of some assistance. Need to put 2 teens through college.
I interviewed Werner Herzog once and asked him if Klaus Kinski was his muse. “No, we were collaborators,” he answered immediately. Considering that their turbulent relationship might have ended in a doube homicide, I wasn’t surprised with the director’s response when I asked if he missed Kinski. “No…only very rarely,” he answered calmly. Peter Geyer’s Jesus Christus Erlöser is a chronicle of Kinski’s crazed and doomed 1971 attempt at a spoken-word performance about Jesus Christ. (Thanks Documentarian.)
Donald Trump: Using the Republican Party the same way he used Marla Maples. (Image by Michele Sandberg.)
That orange-headed fuckface Donald Trump upped the ante early today in his fake run for the Presidency, bringing his ridiculous unilateral feud with President Obama directly to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Trump sneaked onto the lawn and took an electric razor to First Dog Bo, shaving profanities into his coat, and set fire to the White House, burning to the ground what the homely narcissist dubbed “that old, unclassy dump.”
“I can’t prove that Obama wasn’t born in America if I don’t desecrate his Portuguese Water Dog,” said Trump, as he stood near the charred remains of the Lincoln bedroom. “I’m a very smart man. I went to the best schools. I got very good grades. I know what I’m doing.”
Because President Obama is aloof the way many Kenyans are, he ignored the fire and refused to confront his make-believe rival. That won’t stop Trump, though. He is going forward with a round of debates without Obama, hiring the homeless man with the golden voice Ted Williams as a suitable stand-in for the incumbent. The debate will be moderated by Trump’s fellow NBC celebrity, Guy Fieri, who is both stupid and useful.
Tracking polls are showing that Trump is already drawing strong support from gigantic assholes across the country. Now he can probably add to his constituency arsonists and people who own dogs with the word “cocksucker” etched into their back. Still, it won’t be easy to win the Republican nomination with strong competition from Sarah Palin, the other lady who’s even crazier than Sarah Palin, Mitt Romney, Haley Barbour and Brett Favre’s penis. They’re all equally qualified to run the country. But Republicans are just happy to have a candidate who makes Newt Gingrich look morally upstanding by comparison, even though Trump is actually more liberal than Obama on almost every issue.
For their part, NBC executives love the free publicity that Trump brought the network by burning down the White House, and are only disappointed that he didn’t also defecate into the lap of the Lincoln Memorial.
“Apprentice has nearly doubled its ratings from last season and is now averaging almost 8 million viewers an episode,” said one network exec, pulling his head out of his ass long enough to speak. “It’s one of the very few shows we have that is in the zeitgeist and gets those kinds of numbers. So, we certainly want him back. And we’d also like to develop a sitcom for that cocksucker dog.”
Trump is either using his fake Presidential run to boost his ratings and fame by being an even a bigger whore than usual, or perhaps he’s having a complete mental breakdown as the result of suddenly realizing that he’s spent his life renting wives and somehow losing money on casinos.
Whatever the reason, Trump has vowed that when he becomes President he will build a new White House, which won’t be white but gold, and he will install in each bedroom a slot machine and an Eastern European model who swallows. The new building, it can be sure, will look like a huge bag of shit.•
"The man's body was reduced almost to pulp by the fall and it is estimated that every bone in his body was broken." (Image by Joseph Murphy.)
Window cleaning was a perilous endeavor in Old New York, becoming more dangerous as skyscrapers began stretching to the heavens. The harness belt that window cleaners wear today was devised all the way back in 1897, but it wasn’t universally adopted right away nor could it protect against injuries from other unexpected hazards, as these hard-boiled accounts from the Brooklyn Daily Eagle demonstrate.
••••••••••
“Fell Fourteen Stories” (November 4, 1902): “While cleaning windows on the fourteenth floor of the Broadway-Maiden Lane building, an eighteen story sky scraper, on the southeast corner of Broadway and Maiden Lane, Manhattan, this morning, Daniel Murphy, 32 years old, of 961 Dekalb avenue, Brooklyn, missed his footing and fell to the basement. The man’s body was reduced almost to pulp by the fall and it is estimated that every bone in his body was broken.”
••••••••••
“Modern Window Cleaning: A New Device to Keep Men From Falling” (March 28, 1897): “With the advent of the sky scraper office building has come a new device to protect window cleaners who have to work at perilous heights. The cleaner wears a belt which is attached to a fastening on either side of the window by means of a rope. This device is a safeguard against danger and prevents all possibility of accident in the heretofore perilous occupation of window cleaning. The responsibility for accidents from falling rests upon the owners of the buildings, and hence the scheme has met with considerable favor. The plan herewith described is one of several devices, now patented, for the protection of window cleaners. Many of the large office buildings in New York and Brooklyn are equipped with one or another of these devices.”
••••••••••
“A Bootblack Killed By Electricity” (March 18, 1890): “An Italian bootblack named Joe Soleastiani of 47 Mulberry street, New York, while engaged in cleaning windows for the Inter State Bank, at 167 Broadway, late yesterday afternoon placed his hands on an electric light wire that ran into the building.”
••••••••••
“Killed By a Fall From Window” (November 23, 1902): Minnie Siebert, 10 years old, fell from the window of her home, 515 West Fifty-second street, yesterday afternoon and was instantly killed. Yesterday her mother told her to clean the windows. The little girl bowed the shutters and tying them with a string, stood on the window sill and began to her task. The string broke, however, and the child was dashed to the pavement below. Her mother, who was within a few feet of the window from which the child fell, ran down stairs and picked up the child and endeavored to revive her.”
••••••••••
“Nearly Three Years Ago” (August 10, 1859): “Nearly three years ago a young woman broke a pane of glass while cleaning a window, and cut her arm near the wrist. Her wound soon healed, but in a few weeks a swelling arose some distance from the cut which at times was painful. Three medical men were consulted at various times, who all advised compression on the part. This for a time was always successful, but a few days ago, having been more than usually painful, she went to Mr. E. Sidebottom, surgeon, who extracted a piece of glass nearly a half inch square, which had been embedded edge downward all this time. It was taken out about an inch and half from where the first wound was.”
Tree-papers are going and gone in the United States, but Ethiopians still require newsprint to find work and lodging. For those too poor to buy papers, so-called “newspaper landlords” have the solution. They rent periodicals at a penny for about 20 minutes. From a CNN report:
“Garum Tesfaye is one of Addis Ababa’s ‘newspaper landlords,’ a group of entrepreneurs in the Ethiopian capital who rent out papers to people too poor to buy them.
Surrounded by worn-out copies of old newspapers, stacks of gossip magazines and the crisp print of the latest news, Tesfaye sits attentively, checking his watch every now and then.
Near him, a pedestrian bridge provides shelter from the sun to dozens of avid readers who quickly, albeit meticulously, get their dose of the latest news.
For 20 to 30 minutes, these readers can get their hands on a newspaper for a fraction of the price of having to buy it. If they keep the paper longer than their allotted rental time, they have to pay extra.
A newspaper in Addis Ababa costs about six birr (35 U.S. cents) to buy. In contrast, it costs only 50 Ethiopian cents (less than one U.S. cent) to rent one.” (ThanksMarginal Revolution.)
While still located in India, Rajneesh, far right, receives his followers. (Image by Redheylin.)
Using access to newly declassified government files, Les Zaitz of Oregon Live has written “Rajneeshees in Oregon: The Untold Story,” a chilling account of the mad American experience of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, an Indian guru who relocated to the Beaver State during the 1980s, invited 2,000 of his followers to live on his land, incorporated his parcel into a city, ran afoul of local authorities and became involved in bio-terrorism and assassination plots. An excerpt:
“From time to time, Puja retreated to a laboratory hidden in a cabin up a canyon on the ranch to secretly experiment with viruses and bacteria. Sheela wanted something to sicken people.
In summer 1984, Puja field-tested her work, handing unlabeled vials to those on the secret teams.
The operatives knew, or suspected, the brown liquid was salmonella, which produces severe diarrhea and other symptoms. Over months, they were dispatched to spread the poison in The Dalles. They initially hoped to sicken public officials standing in their way, but then pursued a grander scheme to attack innocent citizens.
Swami Krishna Deva, mayor of Rajneeshpuram, smeared Puja’s mixture onto fixtures in the men’s restroom at the Wasco County Courthouse in The Dalles.
Ma Dhyan Yogini, also known as Alma Peralta, went to town with vials in her purse. She stepped into a local political rally and took a seat. She secreted some of the contaminant on her hand, turned to an elderly man sitting next to her and shook hands. She also made her way into a nursing home in The Dalles, but her plan to contaminate food was disrupted by a suspicious kitchen worker.
Sheela tried her hand at contamination as well, taking a half-dozen Rajneeshees, including Puja, to a grocery store in The Dalles.
‘Let’s have some fun,’ Sheela said.
The group spread across the store with Sheela targeting the produce section, pouring brownish liquid from the vial she had hidden up her sleeve.
When there were no public reports of anyone getting sick, Sheela pushed Puja to find a more toxic solution.
About that time, Hulse and two other Wasco County commissioners arrived at the ranch for a tour. They parked Hulse’s car outside the commune’s welcome center and loaded into a commune van for their visit. When they got back, Hulse’s car had a flat. The Rajneeshees arranged a repair on the spot that would cost Hulse $12.
As the commissioners waited in the hot August sun, Puja approached, offering each a glass of water. Her gesture was odd, for Puja was in her medical whites and had no role as a greeter.
The thirsty men took the water.” (Thanks Longform.)
