Miserably funny

http://www.strindbergandhelium.com/

Classes

Have it all

Oh, what a lovely day! It's sunny and warm in London. Yes, people still talk about the weather! And why not have a bit of small talk in our blogs, ladies and gentlemen?
I felt like talking to you last night but I had no energy. Worked for long hours and when I got home, feeling like flooding this blog with my insights, my body switched off. Back to dream land.

It's ok cos I had the most amazingly productive day yesterday. Worked for coca-cola in the morning for a few hours, giving out samples of the new Coke Zero, mingling sentences like "try the new Coke Zero, full taste, zero sugar" with "support the mafia" or "murders in Colombia". I know, it's not a lot of information, but you got to be quick these days. The commuters were in a hurry, thinking about their mortgages, sleepwalking quickly, suddenly bemused by this new product! I had to use those seconds of awareness wisely.

A few semi-awake commuters burst into laughter, but my work mate looked really puzzled and probably went home thinking I'm a complete lunatic. Great! My "bosses" or "coordinators" or whatever came to check our performance. They were really satisfied with my shouting. They love when I shout and "create a buzz". Hahahahaha. They looked grumpy, as all of those who want money more than anything in life. I love them. I want to give them everything.

Yeah, I think people who want money more than anything should have it. After reading Psychopath's Bible I really feel like accelerating the process of destruction of it all. Read it and you'll get it. It makes a lot of sense. Not everything in that book makes sense since it's a mind bending book, designed to make you think, but helping the stream of human disgrace run faster is an attractive task, and I want to do it. Help people get what they want, and the rest will come naturally.

Lust for power and money above all only grows in a dysfunctional society. The need for more and more and more only contaminates the emptiness inside miserable people. Most of us, I think. And doesn't matter how rich you are, you'll always want more, cos the emptiness will never go away. Hahaha. I love it! So, if the rich have never been so rich, if the population has never been so miserable, it means that the whole thing is near the bitter end, when it will swallow itself. Yeah, baby, give me more of it!!! I want to see it, first row, live on TV. It's coming!

Don't be stupid to think we "can make it better". We are so so so sad, so hungry for money, so so miserable, stuck in a world of images, dead, and the only way forward is to let them 300 people get even richer, till the whole world falls apart!

Found this really interesting text about Money versus Wealth
that illustrates brilliantly what we are discussing here.

"According to the official wisdom, even though richer, we can no longer afford what we once took for granted. How is this possible? What's gone wrong?

The problem is this: a predatory global financial system, driven by the single imperative of making ever more money for those who already have lots of it, is rapidly depleting the real capital the human, social, natural, and even physical capital on which our well-being depends.

The truly troubling part is that so many of us have become willing accomplices to what is best described as a war of money against life. It starts, in part, from our failure to recognize that money is not wealth. Wealth is something that has real value in meeting our needs and fulfilling our wants. Modern money is only a number on a piece of paper or an electronic trace in a computer that by social convention gives its holder a claim on real wealth. In our confusion we concentrate on the money to the neglect of those things that actually sustain a good life."

Oh, got a bit carried away. What was I saying? Oh, yes, work. In the evening I worked for Bacardi. Nothing better than alcohol to keep them territorial... mammals... so so stupid...

By the way, I'm feeling fine. Me and the crap-eating salps.

The Map is Not the Territory...

...but a bit of awareness helps.

http://deoxy.org/8brains.htm

Jellyfish-like salps can save us from carbon dioxide

Transparent jellyfish-like creatures known as a salps, considered by many a low member in the ocean food web, may be more important to the fate of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide in the ocean than previously thought.

In the May issue of Deep Sea Research, scientists report that salps, about the size of a human thumb, swarming by the billions in "hot spots" may be transporting tons of carbon per day from the ocean surface to the deep sea and keep it from re-entering the atmosphere.

Salps are semi-transparent, barrel-shaped marine animals that move through the water by drawing water in the front end and propelling it out the rear in a sort of jet propulsion. The water passes over a mucus membrane that vacuums it clean of all edible material.

The oceans absorb excess carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, including some from the burning of fossil fuels. In sunlit surface waters, tiny marine plants called phytoplankton use the carbon dioxide, C02, to grow. Animals then consume the phytoplankton and incorporate the carbon, but most of it dissolves back into the oceans when the animals defecate or die. The carbon can be used again by bacteria and plants, or can return to the atmosphere as heat-trapping carbon dioxide when it is consumed and respired by animals.

Biologists Laurence Madin of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) and Patricia Kremer of the University of Connecticut and colleagues have conducted four summer expeditions to the Mid-Atlantic Bight region, between Cape Hatteras and Georges Bank, in the North Atlantic, since 1975. Each time the researchers found that one particular salp species, Salpa aspera, multiplied into dense swarms that lasted for months.

One swarm covered 100,000 square kilometers (38,600 square miles) of the sea surface. The scientists estimated that the swarm consumed up to 74 percent of microscopic carbon-containing plants from the surface water per day, and their sinking fecal pellets transported up to 4,000 tons of carbon a day to deep water.

"Salps swim, feed, and produce waste continuously," Madin said. "They take in small packages of carbon and make them into big packages that sink fast."

In previous work, Madin and WHOI biologist Richard Harbison found that salp fecal pellets sink as much as 1,000 meters (3,280 feet) a day. The scientists also showed that when salps die, their bodies also sink fast--up to 475 meters (1,575 feet) a day, far faster than most pellets.. If salps are really a dead-end in the food web and remain uneaten on the way down, they could send even more carbon to the deep.

Salpa aspera swims long distances down in daylight and back up at night in what is known as vertical migration. Madin, Kremer and colleagues Peter Wiebe and Erich Horgan of WHOI and Jennifer Purcell and David Nemazie of the University of Maryland found that the salps stay at depths of 600 to 800 meters (1,970 to 2,625 feet) during the day, coming to the surface only at night.

"At the surface," Madin said, "salps can feed on phytoplankton. They may swim down in the day to avoid predators or damaging sunlight. And swimming up at night allows them to aggregate to reproduce and multiply quickly when food is abundant."

Because of this behavior, salps release fecal pellets in deep water, where few animals eat them. This enhances the transport of carbon away from the atmosphere.

In 2004 and 2006, Madin and Kremer studied salp swarms in a different ecosystem, the Southern Ocean near Antarctica. Some scientists have reported larger salp populations there in warmer years with less sea ice. If this proves true, and if Antarctica's climate warms, salp swarms could have a greater effect on phytoplankton and carbon in the Southern Ocean ecosystem.

From Underwater Times


Check Oceanusfor more information, pictures and videos

.

And the world cup ends for me...

Buddhism has the characteristics of what would be expected in a cosmic religion for the future: It transcends a personal God, avoids dogmas and theology; it covers both the natural and the spiritual, and it is based on a religious sense aspiring from the experience of all things, natural and spiritual, as a meaningful unity.

Albert Einstein

Picture and quote from God is not an asshole

Peace takes courage

Everytime I read about the war in Iraq my stomach hurts so much I have to skip the reading. Same thing with images about Iraq. Same thing, no. It is worse with images. Can't face it. I know I've been negleting a very important charpter of our sinister history but hey, can't handle it. But apparently a conscious child in Alabama can, and very well. Ava Lowery is only 15 years old but she's an outstanding peace activist who made her first animation in Mid-March 2005 and since then has made over 70 animations, many of them about the war in Iraq. Her project Peace Takes Courage is now a website full of information about politics, USA and the war in Iraq. Here is one of her videos
and this is the Peace Takes Courage website


Peace takes a lot of courage, and so does watching all those images. Respect, little Ava.

Peace Takes Courage

Confidence

"You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You must do the thing which you think you cannot do."

Eleanor Roosevelt


"Without self-confidence we are as babes in the cradle. And how can we generate this imponderable quality, which is yet so invaluable, most quickly? By thinking that other people are inferior to oneself."

Virginia Woolf


I'm looking into those eyes now. The eyes of my own fear. It makes me so strong I can't stop staring at them, evil watery blue eyes.
Let me never put you down to feel more confident, cos that's cheating. That's too small. Hope you have the balls to do the same.

Me

Eddie travels with Tony Blair to European Council in Brussels

Eddie travelled with Tony Blair to Brussels yesterday. He was shadowing the PM during a European council and had unique behind-the-scenes access. Whilst he was there, he recorded a Pod Cast which will go live on the Downing Street website at midnight tonight (Friday 16th June). There will also be an article about the trip penned by Eddie himself in Saturday's Guardian. To listen to Eddie's Pod Cast visit: pm.gov.uk

Pronoia

The suspicion the Universe is a conspiracy on your behalf.

On the terrestrial level, pronoia should be defined as the opposite of paranoia: the sneaking suspicion others are conspiring to help you (and you them!). Symptoms include: sudden attacks of optimism and outbreaks of goodwill.

Source:
1. John Perry Barlow
2. Zippies

Read Deoxy.org
Emancipate yourself from mental slavery.

St. George's Cross

I live in a island of my own when it comes to the last futile polemics, even though I read a few papers everyday. I kind of noticed there is a St. George's Cross issue going on at the moment but every time I tried to read those articles I felt amazingly sleepy and moved on.
Yesterday, on the way to our first gig, i asked the guys in the band to explain me what was really happening. No, I shouldn't have asked. Ignorance is bliss. Whatta fuck?? They wanted to ban the use of the english flag cos it has fascist connotations? Blind me. Whatta fucking situation you got yourself into, hu? Can't use your flag anymore? haha. If you only kepf your mouth shut, some of us wouldn't have noticed the "fascist connotations" mate. To me, that red cross is the English fucking flag and so it is, no? A group of fuckers adopted the English flag to represent their "movement" and now you can't support your team? That's insane. Would someone explain me what is really happening? Can't be that...

Funny one liners

100,000 sperm and you were the fastest?
42.7 percent of all statistics are made up on the spot.
99 percent of lawyers give the rest a bad name.
A bartender is just a pharmacist with a limited inventory.
A clean desk is a sign of a cluttered desk drawer.
A clear conscience is usually the sign of a bad memory.
A closed mouth gathers no foot.
A conclusion is the place where you got tired of thinking.
A day without sunshine is like, night.
A diplomat is someone who can tell you to go to hell in such a way that you will look forward to the trip.
A flashlight is a case for holding dead batteries.
All generalizations are false, including this one.
All men are idiots, and I married their King.
Always remember you're unique, just like everyone else.
Always try to be modest and be proud of it!
Anything worth taking seriously is worth making fun of.
Artificial Intelligence usually beats real stupidity.
Assassins do it from behind.
Atheism is a non-prophet organization.
Auntie Em, Hate you, hate Kansas, taking the dog. Dorothy.
Be nice to your kids. They'll choose your nursing home.
Beauty is in the eye of the beer holder.
Beer: It's not just for breakfast anymore.
Before you criticize someone, you should walk a mile in their shoes. That way, when you criticize them, you're a mile away and you have their shoes.

Continues

Mozart's Brain and the Fighter Pilot

I'm reading this wonderful book called Mozart's Brain and the Fighter Pilot by Richard Restak. It basically teaches us how to be smarter, "boosting our brain's cognitive performance by increasing alertness, concentration, memory, problem-solving ability, mental endurance and much more" with practical advices and 28 great examples of very simple exercises to improve our grey matter.

In one chapter Dr. Restak explains how our brain develop linkages when we associate things and says the more we link different things, the more we think clearly, better, more efficiently, outside the box. Ok, we knew that. But an interesting way to create new links is to think about two seemingly unrelated objects or things and link them somehow in a story, creating then new connections in the brain. His example is interesting but I'm feeling too lazy to describe it. Go buy the book and read it.

Another exercise suggested in that same chapter is to write random thoughts with as little conscious control as possible. He asks us to vomit words, than analyze your connections, tracking your thoughts, creating a brain map. Ok, your read Finnegans Wake and this is all very old to you. Fine. I wrote random thoughts a few times and the text below was my first try.

Bliuskiblup
That building is a recollection of mysteries, renegade, hats in the wind and we live not knowing, but tomorrow will awake our fridges and laces to the point of exhaustion.
I recommend love but life keeps leaving me alone till I agree with you, subversive twat, enchants me with your malice and childlikeness in the rain, rather, in the drizzle, under it, over my thought that seems boring for somebody who wants to spit the world unfair, you stink. I'd rather be home, but I am so I cry, since my days are yet to come and I'm falling from the edge, the end of the flat board of wisdoms, shallowisms and hypocrisy.
Two oranges and a violin. He told me to make sounds, play instruments for tomorrow we'll be in a room together, making songs and singing sadness. Ideas of grandeur come to my head and I feel bad for screwing up the vibe. What?? I said tomorrow!! You never know what the day will bring, lady of the dead, princess without a castle, without a name, without.
I admire you, me, for we are strong and willing to be more and more each day. I won't let me bitter down the road, eating bread all day long, with coffee, alone. I don't like it.


I really tried to write randomly but it came out so neat! I don't know. Maybe I should snort a line of K and try again. Write your own random shit here if you feel like it. It's fun, and gives you insights on how your brain works. And then, change it!

On the other hand

I like cleaning. When I first moved to that squat in highgate I went mad, though. Those stairs with 3 inches of dust, never been mopped, windows were grey so much dirt, mushrooms growing happily in the bathrooms, filthy. I had a bedroom just for me in North Finchley, breakfast and dinner included, paid, but I met my ex on the stairs of that building when visiting a friend and went dumb. Moved in and started cleaning. Had to put up with an unbelievable amount of arrogance and mental illness and on the top of that do some extra thinking. That thinking wasn't mine.

I believe when we clean we think. We clean ourselves while cleaning our environment and an extremely dirty home means people who live there are not dealing with their mental issues. If I clean for myself, I deal with myself but if I clean someone else's place I'm thinking what them repressed twats should be thinking, not I. Well, it's gone, forgiven if not forgotten.

Nowadays I wipe my own table wiping those thoughts away. I can see resentments mingled with bleach in my bucket, which I flush down the drain blissfully. Cleaning my windows makes my sight reach the once remote and rinsing my dishes unblocks my stomach, setting adrift on my anxieties.

There's a healthy level of dirt of course, the biological dirt, natural, and healthy levels of unatural dirt as we could never get rid of all issues at once but I.m cultivating my own mess in my own house now. I have my own place, a new chapter of my life begins, and cleaning and thinking belongs to my baby and I alone.

"Cleanliness Is Next to Godliness" or washing and brainwashing

"The remaining noticable characteristic of 'Che' is his filth. He hates to wash and will never do so. He is filthy, even by the rather low standard of cleanliness prevailing among the Castro forces in the Sierra Maestra. Once in a while, "Che" would take some of his men to a stream or pool, in order that they might wash. On those occasions "Che" would never wash either himself or his clothes, but would sit on the bank and watch the others. He is really outstandingly and spectacularly dirty." --slanderous description of Che Guevara from the 1958 C.I.A. dossier

[...]

These days, cleanliness is defined more by corporations selling "sanitation products" than by anyone else. This is important to keep in mind. Certainly, most of these products have an uncanny ability to cut through natural dirt and grime-but does removing natural dirt and grime with synthetic chemicals necessarily constitute the only acceptable form of sanitation? I'm at least as frightened by these manufactured, artificial products as I am of a little dust, mud, or sweat, or (god forbid!) a stain from food or blood on my shirt. At least I know where the dirt/"filth" came from and what it's made of!

The idea that it is worthwhile to use chemicals (whether they be deodorant, detergent, or shampoo) to eradicate organic dirt has some frightening implications, too. First, it supports the old Christian superstition that the biological body is shameful and should be hidden--that our bodies and our existence in the physical world as animals are intrinsically disgusting and sinful. This groundless idea has been used to keep us insecure and ashamed, and thus at the mercy of the priests and other authorities who tell us how to become "pure": once, by submitting to their holy denial of the self, and now, by spending plenty of our money on the various "sanitation" products they want to sell us. Also, as capitalism transforms the entire world from the organic (forests, swamps, deserts, rivers) to the inorganic (cities of concrete and steel, suburbs of asphalt and astroturf, wastelands that have been stripped of all natural resources, garbage dumps) the idea that there is something more worthwhile about synthetic chemicals than natural dirt implies that this transformation might actually be a good thing... and thus implicitly justifies their profit-motivated destruction of our planet.

[...]

Continues on Deoxy.org

Cat Brain Map

Let there be light

Creative Commons "Some Rights Reserved": Building a Layer of Reasonable Copyright

Too often the debate over creative control tends to the extremes. At one pole is a vision of total control—a world in which every last use of a work is regulated and in which "all rights reserved" (and then some) is the norm. At the other end is a vision of anarchy—a world in which creators enjoy a wide range of freedom but are left vulnerable to exploitation. Balance, compromise, and moderation—once the driving forces of a copyright system that valued innovation and protection equally—have become endangered species.

Creative Commons is working to revive them. We use private rights to create public goods: creative works set free for certain uses. Like the free software and open-source movements, our ends are cooperative and community-minded, but our means are voluntary and libertarian. We work to offer creators a best-of-both-worlds way to protect their works while encouraging certain uses of them—to declare "some rights reserved."




http://creativecommons.org


.

Common sense

I'm confused

Albert Einstein:

Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen.


Will Rogers:

Common sense ain't common.


Henry Ward Beecher:

The philosophy of one century is the common sense of the next.



And my mum watches soap opera while I type.

Quotes

"Creative minds have always been known to survive any kind of bad training."

Anna Freud


"I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world."

Albert Einstein

What's next?