Recap: Dispatches From SDCC

There is a mad, fetishism to San Diego Comic Con. By virtue of the overall weirdness of everything, the surreal becomes ordinary. When 125,000 black sheep are herded together, none of them can be picked off for being out of place. Everyone belongs. It’s the club anyone can join, but the rub is that most people don’t want to.

Comics, because of the misconception that they are by and large intended for children, have an awful stigma attached to them. This has lessened since Hollywood, the amorphous entertainment producing entity that determines what is hip, increased its respect for the Super Hero. Nonetheless, the idea of a Comic Nerd conjures an image of a person socially marginalized for either their looks or indomitable awkwardness and, despite the fact that there are “cool” people who read comics (Sam Jackson, for one of thousands of examples), the stereotype is mostly true.

The pervasive model in American comics is: they star people who are either alienated, flawed, alone or outcast; they are read by people who share these characteristics; a select few of the people who read them go on to create them. The readers and creators all join to celebrate the product that they, after a fashion, have collaborated on in a momentous gathering in San Diego once a year.*

At the celebration, some get literal with their connection to favorite characters by becoming them – feeling the power of the mask. Others feel emboldened by the fact that no masks are necessary here – you are completely free to be yourself. Your passion is nothing to embarrassed of here, it’s a badge of honor. The white sheep is the one who doesn’t belong.

*Truly, they gather far more often in smaller clusters around the world, but lets focus on the current.

Panic: Dispatches From SDCC

San Diego Comic Con is heaven for geeks and hell for their girlfriends. It's a boondogle, hornswaggle and bandersnatch all in one. Its become an entity unto itself -- an organism of mass entropy, swallowing everything in its path as it balloons to unearthly proportions. The disorder in this system is rampant and it is a system that -- with its 150,000 moving bipedal parts -- feels as though it may collapse at any given moment.

The herd shifts slowly, it's constituents bouncing into one and another like molecules slowly being heated in a beaker. The herd is made up of parts that become nearly indistinguishable, despite familiar faces and outlandish costumes, the masses become one pulsating beast. When panic strikes, I expect the following to occur (gleaned indirectly from W.D. Hamilton's article Geometry For The Selfish Herd):

• Individuals attempt to move faster than normal
• Interactions between individuals become physical
• Exits become arched and clogged
• Escape is slowed by fallen individuals serving as obstacles
• Individuals display a tendency towards mass or copied behavior
• Alternative or less used exits are overlooked.

I fear I will destroyed in a Geek Big Bang that will end all geeks and shower the universe with their exploded parts.

For now, the Hive Mind is focused on collection, but not just comics and free posters, its collecting information in the form of exclusive footage from film features or first-time announcements of special projects all carefully aimed at the bouncing molecules. A bullseye will set of a chain reaction that with cause an explosion of dollars months from now.

For now I remain in limbo, struggling to resist the herd and the draw of the hive -- a super heroic task indeed.

Monkey Shines and Belief Systems

Boy, I sure do love monkeys! Maybe it's that biological heritage -- that genetic proximity that makes me think "Detective Chimp" is one of the coolest comic book characters ever.



Today marks the anniversary of the Scopes vs. State of Tennessee (aka the Scopes Monkey Trial, decided July 21st, 1925). John Scopes, a school teacher and part-time football coach, faced jailing for allegedly teaching evolution to school children. God forbid! (literally). The ACLU already had designs on taking down the ludicrous piece of legislation that forbade such "heresy" and poor John wound up in the middle, and despite being convicted, came out a hero (although he claimed he skipped that chapter).

Defense Attorney Clarence Darrow taking apart William Jennings Bryan must have been quite a spectacle to behold as they argued about everything from apes to Adam and Eve. In hindsight, the argument seems so ridiculous -- teaching a creation myth in a science class? However, 83 years later, the debate rages on. It's easy to see how, in a world where people still think the first woman came from a man's rib, that Global Warming is ignored.


[Darrow and Bryan]

What was obvious to students of science was verboten by God. Sometimes its hard to imagine that Creationists have the same shocked expression on their faces as those persuaded by science do when presented with the opposing viewpoint. "You think we descended from lesser species?" Preposterous!

That disconnect -- between faith and science -- is almost impossible to reconcile because the core of each sides understanding is rooted in an entirely different plane. There is no algorithm to prove or disprove the existence of God (despite what some philosophers have proffered to the contrary.) Each side is making its argument in an entirely different language.

So while I have an enormous amount of appreciation and gratitude towards my parents for not being religious nutballs, the people I would call "religious nutballs" give thanks to God that their parents were NOT godless heretics.



Illustration from Albertus Seba's "The Cabinet of Natural Curiosities."

Credit Card Scam: "Reservation Rewards"

There is a reason that your inbox gets flooded with spam, and it's not because everyone is an impotent, poorly-hung, anxious, depressive, small-breasted person begging to help out a Sudanese millionaire stow away his money in their bank account. It's because people actually fall for that digital sleight of hand. For those of us that see the hook poking out from the worm and keep on swimming, there are more intricate nets waiting to scoop us out and shake us upside down until the change falls from our pockets -- the most recent one I've come across (by way of falling into it) comes from "Reservation Rewards."

Maria was doing my accounting for Jan '08 to now, which involves an astronomical number of credit card transactions, so it was no surprise that the repeated monthly charge for a mere $12 to "Reservation Rewards" had consistently snuck past me:



Maria smartly realized that I had no idea what that charge was or why it was recurring. I Googled the listed phone number and found many other blogs reporting that others had been duped by the fraudulent company for as little as $9 and up to $12.

They fish your information when you make other online purchases (in my case, a movietickets.com purchase, so that site can go and piss right off) explaining that you actually did sign up for the program, probably via an unnoticed check mark in a pop-up window.

While others reported problems canceling (their postings were older), I called the number and explained that I never signed up and that I wanted to cancel and get a full refund. They didn't even question it, said they would refund me the money within four business days and send email confirmation (we'll see if they do), thank you very much have a nice day. It was the operator who told me I signed up on Movietickets.com (bastards) and that was that.

Lesson learned, now EVERYONE should check their statements for the "Reservation Rewards" bill (also appears as "Web Loyalty") and if you have it call the number shown here and ask for refund:


(click to see full-size)

I'm curious to see if this happened to anyone else, or if I'm the only one who needs to pay better attention to the monthly statements.

Watchmen Trailer Easter Egg

According to the MPAA, there are certain things you can't do in movie trailers -- the green ones anyway -- and while many are obvious (like show two frontally nude people get shot in the face and say "fuck!") others are not. Watchmen director Zack Snyder ran into a problem with a few frames from the trailer that showed the assassination attempt on Ozymandias in which the would-be-killer is (sort of) pointing a gun at the camera. You can show the weapon, but it cannot be pointed at the audience (maybe people would shoot back?), so Snyder had the gun replaced with a walkie-talkie -- the same maneuver Spielberg pulled in E.T., which infuriated fans.

Shots of the cleverly satirical homage are below -- note the radio in the first shot and gun in second.



[MTV]

Beijing Boom and Warren Ellis

Recently I worked on a new G.I. Joe series written by one of my favorite scribes and futurist visionaries Warren Ellis. During a conference call with Hasbro, some execs informed Warren that the scene in which he vaporized Beijing should be excised from the storyline (he details the scenario here in his blog) and the exchange went something like according to aforementioned blog:

HASBRO: No, Warren, you cannot wipe Beijing from the face of the earth.

WARREN: Shit. (pause) What about Moscow?

HASBRO: Wiping Moscow from the face of the earth would be fine.

The logic was that Beijing was host to the Olympics this year, so best not to vaporize it. Fair enough? Maybe...except that Beijing could use a fictional catastrophe to set them straight after taking actions like this:

Beijing police have been visiting bar owners in the popular Sanlitun area and asking them to sign pledges agreeing to not serve black people or Mongolians and ban activities including dancing. [The Age]

If oppressing Tibet wasn't bad enough, may as well throw a few other peoples under the old boot heel, eh? This action is actually in preparation for the Olympics. I didn't realize Beijing was trapped in the 5th Century...makes you wonder how they produce so much computer hardware. The Minister of Culture (Orwell anyone?) was also infuriated with Bjork after she cried for Tibetian freedom after a concert in China.

Ellis once again proved his ahead of the curve as this tip-of-the-iceberg move by Beijing's Brother Eye would probably have made the city's animated destruction a popular YouTube clip.

Because We Have Incisors!

The opening of a vegan strip club in Portland, OR reminds me of an old battle I used to wage daily living in Virginia.

During meals, I found a favorite sport among meat eaters was pointing out why not eating meat is a ridiculous pursuit because we are meant to eat meat. And I should mention now that this post is almost 100% directed at my former college roommate Ryan (I miss you pal, but that doesn't mean I won't subject you to a one-way argument wherein I offer you no chance for rebuttal). I'm completely open to discussing the ups and downs of a vegan diet and its viability, but one particular argument always made me want to run a bolt-gun into the person putting it forward: Humans have incisors that were made for eating meat, so we should use them for that task.

Right, of course! How could I be so obtuse? A piece of my anatomy allows me to do something, so therefore I should do it! That seems logical enough...

Certainly years of exercise puts me in better physical condition than a majority of people and I know that I'm at least strong enough to beat the dentures out of an old lady, so it follows that--even though I find it morally objectionable--I should use my superior strength to wrestle her change purse away because I need money to survive. I need money like a I need protein and yeah, there are other places to get it, but getting it the easy way is best!

And yes, our teeth are "made" to eat meat aren't they? Why, I bet I could walk right up to a pig and just take a big ol' bite out of his tender hind quarters like the proverbial Big Bad Wolf! Actually, despite Mike Tyson's ability to chomp into another humans ear, most people can't use their teeth to tear into flesh. Without being ground up or cooked first, the most a person could do to a piece of meat is leave some teeth marks in it.

The vegan strip club is aimed directly at the sort of people who are likely to proffer the old tooth argument, which is an offshoot of ideas about manliness/hunting/power. Historically, animal rights and women's rights were somewhat aligned in that it there was overlap between proponents of both ("I am not a piece of meat"/"I will not eat meat") -- a subject the NY Times piece on the club elaborates on.

So, maybe Ryan would never listen to me, but maybe he'd listen to the girls at Casa Diablo?


[photo by Lisa Bauso for The New York Times]

The Watchmen Movie Trailer

I'm too excited about posting and will forgoe expounding upon the virtues of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons legendary graphic novel "Watchmen"

This is a shot of Dr. Manhattan...it's far too small to really convey how epic the shot from the trailer is...


Follow me to Apple

Oh Sweet Justice

If you grew up in the San Fernando Valley, Long Island, almost anywhere in New Jersey and most of the South, you are familiar with the ever-detestable white gangster. Millions of teens, doused in Polo Sport cologne, shaking the 7-11 parking with basslines from Eminem before buzzing off in a souped-up Honda Civic to go sMokE BluNtz wit da gUrLz have at one point or another suffered imaginary deaths by all our hands. Pacing up and down streets with comically long strides and chins pointed into the air, these former shelter pups transformed into junkyard dawgs after discovering creatine, silver chains, wife-beaters, Lil' Wayne, Against All Odds and sick line-ups.

Today marks a small victory for those of us who've long fantasized about transplanting any one of these self-parodies into the middle of a maximum security prison as alleged DUI killer Joseph Genovese Jr. digs his own grave via MySpace.

Joseph, or "Douchington" as I would rather refer to him, decided it would be funny to put his main pic on MySpace as the mugshot Philadelphia police took of him after the 18-year old killed two people in a drunk driving murder accident. Prosecutors will have to look little further than his profile to find evidence that Douchington is actually the half-retarded Son of Satan and deserves to be mouth-raped by every 1 in 5 herpes carrier in Riker's Island.

Under a photo of his speedometer reading "105 mph" he writes: "aLiL UnDer 120 OnPAcKeR aVE!!..yea digg????"

Under a photo of him with a vodka bottle: "i DRAnK DAt WHOLE BOtTLe!!"

Occupation: "JuSt B DAt Boii!!!..."

Genovese now stands accused of involuntary manslaughter, homicide by vehicle, homicide by vehicle while under the influence and DUI in the death of Cindi Grassi -- he's still in prison because despite a listed income of $250,000 a year, he can't make the $200,000 bail.

His new occupation is going to be "aNaL rAPe v1cTuuum bOiii!" -- I'm sure John McCain can come up with some good jokes about him too.

"Rape Ape:" At Least McCain Has a Sense of Humor!...wait

Mocking Obama is tough business, so says Maureen Dowd this morning in the NY Times and so say his staunch reporters whose silence in the Daily Show audience once prompted host John Stewart to counsel, "It's okay to laugh at him, you know." Humor is a universal access point -- a great equalizer that should be embraced. Why, just ask Senator John McCain who thought he would warm up the crowd at the National League of Cities and Towns in Washington D.C with this zinger:

"Have you heard the one about woman who is attacked on the street by a gorilla, beaten senseless, raped repeatedly and left to die? [senile chuckle] When she finally regains consciousness and tries to speak, her doctor leans over to hear her sigh contently and to feebly ask, 'Where is that marvelous ape?'"

[crickets]

If you're going to offend an entire crowd of potential supporters with a joke, at least make it funny -- remember the one you told back at GOP fund raiser in 1998?

"Why is Chelsea Clinton so ugly? Because her father is Janet Reno!"

The joke was actually a dig at Hillary Clinton for being a lesbian (a popular rumor to spread about any woman in a power position) and the fact he made it 10 years ago is the only thing that makes think the story of this new joke (via HuffPo) is true.

I can't wait until it gets closer to the election and he busts out his A material...

The Ever-Offensive New Yorker

What a bunch of total fucking bastards. They've got some real balls to do this...

Seriously, can we stop talking about this now?

Machete Squad

Marc turned me onto "The Pillowman," a play by Martin McDonagh about an author who is taken into custody because he's excessively perverse and violent stories are coming true and they think he is behind the crimes. It's a great premise, but the chances of that coincidence are slim....right?

In July, The NY Post reported on an assault in the hipsterrificly gentrified Brooklyn neighborhood of Williamsburg. This would be the standard police blotter copy, except that the attacker was using a machete (Crocodile Dundee did not return calls for comment), which the last time I checked was the weapon of choice in places like Rwanda, not the land of $4 organic cookies $40 used t-shirts.

As you may have guessed, it's not the kid's drinking PBR at Union Pool hacking each other into minute-steaks and the police are pointing towards the South Side Williamsburg gang "The Trinitarios."

What in this YouTube video could possibly make the cops think they had anything to do with this? Surely it's a coincidence, just like in "Pillowman"...

Paramount Loses $450M

So Deutsche Bank was bankrolling a number of projects at Paramount including Benjamin Button, TF2 and Tropic of Thunder. They shut their film fund down ($450 M), so now there is temporarily no one to foot the bill for these 30-odd films they were writing checks for. Paramount was operating on borrowed cash, now they're out, but not done. They will have to either:

a) find another bank (shouldn't be too hard when you're the only studio in town actually making money)

b) go to dad (Viacom) for more money.

It probably sounds more dire than it is, but that is a serious hit not just to Paramount, but everyone -- it's a bad sign when a bank of Deutsche caliber starts tightening it's vice grib on the wallet.

Read more here

Iceland Furry (stop motion goodness)

Excessively talented cinematographer/photographer Sean Stiegemeier recently returned from making a commercial in Iceland with his firey bloggeratti girlfriend Royale Fatale and slave labor crew members Kenny and Mike. When the environmentalist PSA ad is complete, I'll be sure to share, but until then, I ripped this off from Polly's blog because it's just so god damn good.


Iceland Furry from sean stiegemeier on Vimeo.

You Might Be A Drug Addict Alien Abductee If....

Nothing says "waste of time" like surveying people from South Jersey about their alleged abductions by aliens. According a study by Ted Goertzel of Rutgers University, South Jerseyans are far more likely than your average American to be abducted (he was actually working to improve on a previous study). If I were an alien and fished some yokel out of the Pine Barrens, I'd probably throw 'em back too. Take a look at the questions from the study Goertzel referenced that were used to determine if the interviewee had been carried off and probed:

1. Waking up paralyzed with a sense of a strange person or presence or something else in the room.
2. Experiencing a period of time of an hour or more, in which you were apparently lost, but you could not remember why or where you had been.
3. Feeling that you were actually flying through the air although you didn't know why or how.
4. Seeing unusual lights or balls of light in a room without knowing what was causing them.
5. Finding puzzling scars on your body and neither you nor anyone else remembering how you received them or where you got them.

Playing the ever-skeptical Scully to Ted's Mulder, I'd have to assume there is a plausible explanation for each of the 5 symptoms numbered accordingly:

1. Roofies.
2. Whiskey.
3. Weed.
4. Shrooms/LSD/DMT.
5. Crystal Meth.

Given the abundance of all these substances in South Jersey, I'd say the surveyed people were more likely to have visited the right alley in Camden, rather than a spaceship.

[io9]

The "Stoned Ape" Hypothesis

After a chat about my post on the Electric Kool-Aid John's Hopkins Acid Test, hallucinogen baker and aspiring psychedelic botanist DJ Robot recently turned me onto the drug-addled waxings of Terrance McKenna. McKenna, a philosopher, ethnobotanist, druggie and rare plant collector, has posited some theories about the involvement of psilocybin mushrooms in human evolution that are so outstandingly ludicrous and awesome that I wish I thought of them myself. His brilliant hypotheses are so far-fetched that they almost make my position on Lewis' Carroll's prophetic nature seem plausible, but beyond the mushroom jazz, there are some interesting thoughts on agriculture and the development of a human ego.

McKenna states in an interview with Omni Magazine (May 1993)

Lab work shows that psilocybin eaten in amounts so small that it can't be detected, as an experience, increases visual acuity. In the Sixties, Roland Fisher at the National Institute of Mental Health gave graduate students psilocybin and then a battery of eye tests. His results indicated that edges were visually detected more readily if a bit of psilocybin was present in the student's body. Well, edge detection is exactly what hunting animals in the grassland environments use to observe distant prey! So here you have this chemical factor; when added to the diet, it results in greater success in hunting. That, in turn, results in greater success in child rearing and so increases the size of the next generation.

As we descended from the trees and into the grasslands, began to experiment with bipedal gait and omnivorous diet, we encountered mushrooms. At low does, they increase visual acuity; at midrange, they cause general central-nervous system arousal, which in a highly sexed primate means a lot of horsing around, which means there is more pregnancy among females associated with psilocybin-using behavior. Higher dosages of psilocybin leads to group sexuality and dissolved boundaries between ecstasy.


Unfortunately, McKenna has no evidence to support this claim, but I'd be hard pressed to come up with a more revolutionary theory about how humans made the Great Leap. Even if I did, I could never top the "Stoned Ape" moniker...

The mushroom daze were over as African plain began to dry up and the proto-hippies were forced to grow their own food due to scarcity -- the birth of agriculture (so says McKenna -- I'd have gone with Ferticle Crescent as an exact locale, but I'm not the one choking down fungus like Cheerios). But agriculture was born with an evil twin: Ego. If this is already a well known psychological milestone, I've not been made aware of it.

From 75,000 to about 15,000 years ago, there was a kind of human paradise on Earth. People danced, sang, had poetry, jokes, riddles, intrigue, and weapons, but they didn't possess the notion of ego as we've allowed it to crystallize in Western societies. The reason for this lack of ego was a social style of mushroom taking and an orgiastic sexual style that was probably lunar in its timing. Nobody went more than three or four weeks before they were redissolved into pure feeling and boundary dissolution. Community, loyalty, altruism, self-sacrifice -- all these values that we take to be the basis of humanness -- arose at the time in a situation in which the ego was absent.

[Riddles indeed...I'm quite sure I've seen "How do you feed 16 apes with only 15 apples?" scrawled onto a cave wall somewhere...]

Agriculture represents an intellectual understanding of how cause and effect can be separated in time. You return to last year's camp, look where you discarded the trash, and there all in one place are the food planets you so carefully gathered. Women, the gatherers, put this together: Wow! Bury food, come back a year later, and it's there. This was a watershed in the development of abstract thought.

At the same time, men were understanding that the sex act, previously associated with this group orgiastic stuff, was the equivalent of burying food and coming back a year later! Male paternity is recognized as a phenomenon. The road to hell is paved -- eight lanes! -- from that point on. The man thinks my - - my children, not our children -- and therefore, animals I kill are food for my woman and my children. Woman are seen as property. The ego is rampant and in full force.

This is all fascinating, but under the slightest bit of scrutiny it dissipates faster than a whip-it. Agriculture was preceded by the hunter-gatherer model, which already placed the male species in a power position and if a species has the mental faculties to tell jokes/riddles/sing/make weapons (no, I don't think they did any of these save the tethering of a sharp rock to a stick), then it follows that they could infer that sex=babies.

Depiste the above, it doesn't matter to me that his theories are nothing more than shamanistic drug visions. They are amazing to read about because they are so far removed from anything that's out there. So what if it's wrong? The beauty of science and philsophy and independent thought is that you can be wrong and you can ask, "What if...?"

Maybe we didn't make the Great Leap because a pack of silver backs chowed down on shrooms, but one thing is for sure: We made it by thinking outside the comfortable boundaries.

And for the record: To feed the 16 apes with 15 apples?

Make applesauce.

John's Hopkins Is Trippin'

In days of financial despair, I've volunteered for some medical studies. Most of them either swiftly disqualified me or fed me pills that drove me level of madness not seen since Nicholson chased his family around a haunted hotel with an ax. This one looks like it would have the same effect, only with less murder and more black light posters.

"Researchers at the Johns Hopkins University are seeking volunteers with a current or past diagnosis of cancer who have some anxiety or are feeling down about their cancer to participate in a scientific study of self-exploration and personal meaning brought about by the entheogen psilocybin, a psychoactive substance found in mushrooms used as a sacrament in some cultures, given in a comfortable, supportive setting. Questionnaires and interviews will be used to assess the effects of the substance on consciousness, mood, and behavior.

Volunteers enrolled in the study will receive careful preparation and 2 sessions in which they will receive psilocybin. Structured guidance will be provided during the session and afterwards to facilitate integration of the experiences. The study complies with FDA regulations.

Volunteer must be between the ages of 21 and 70, have no personal history of severe psychiatric illness, or recent history of alcoholism or drug abuse, have someone willing to pick them up and drive them home at the end of the two psilocybin sessions (around 5:00 PM)."

Sign Up

Michelle Obama

If you are a conservative/neo-conservative, hawkish liberal or just plain Republican, there are a plethora of reasons to dislike Obama -- his level of experience, his attitudes about defense spending or focus on the wrong kind of "green," but for the love of God, his wife is not one of them.

The line between disagreement and attack is not a fine one at all -- it's about as thick as the skull of the person who mistook Barack and Michelle Obama's fist pound for a "terrorist fist jab" (see video). Yes, the company you keep does reflect on your character, but when a news network that specializes in character assassination puts the future first lady (yes, he's going to win) in its cross hairs for such infinitesimal infractions, its sickening. You would think that even on the slowest news day an entire building worth of journalists could come up with more concrete charges to bring against a candidate than the words of his wife, but apparently not. Her words are constantly twisted, she is mocked and unjustifiably dragged through the mud. Its unbelievably sensationalist and such a profoundly disgusting misuse of audience it's staggering to try and comprehend.

Apparently, Barack's "baby momma" is just an "angry black woman" who gives "terrorist fist jabs."


The fact that some people would just as soon see her relegated to the back of the bus will only make the day she rides a stretch limo to the White House that much more satisfying.

Lewis Carroll, The Hadron Collider, Mayans and The End of the World

Lewis Carroll, the visionary author who plunged poor Alice down a rabbit hole, played with logic in ways no one had ever seen before and created iconic characters and concepts that became indelible parts of our popular culture ("White Rabbit" by Jefferson Airplane to the Batman villain "The Mad Hatter" and thousands more). Much like the fantasy-cum-reality weapons from a previous post, Carroll's work is something I plan on referencing repeatedly because it's oh-so-fascinating. "Jabberwocky," the nonsense poem included in the mostly nonsensical sequel to Alice In Wonderland, Through the Looking Glass, is a prime example of Carroll's ability to make something out of nothing -- the words aren't even real...or are they?

Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe

What does that have to do with a Hadron Collider, Mayans and the end of the world?

Everything.

Carroll was known to use laudanum and opiates; experienced terrible migraines; and suffered from "Alice in Wonderland" syndrome -- also known as micro- or macro- psia, a condition in which one is unable to properly perceive the spatial relationships between objects (a giant might look like a doormouse? Or tall Alice...). Then there is the controversy with Liddell that I won't even get into. The problem with possibly being insane is that no one will listen to you. If Carroll was able to predict the future, would anyone believe him? If during his painful episodes and "migraines" where the world warped into a hallucinogenic mess, he could see the way things would pan out, no one would listen. Then why not encode it in text?*

More on that in a moment....if I told you the world was going to end, would you believe me?

2012 is the new 2000. Sites like survive2012.com foretell of doom, giving us a narrow 4-year window to live. What could possibly destroy us on such short notice? Our telescopes can see asteroids hundreds of thousands of miles away. Nuclear weapons can wipe out cities, but not an entire planet in such a short time. Even global warming needs a few more centuries. The Large Hadron Collider, however, could do by December 21, 2012.

Before the year is out, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), is due to start slamming protons together with more force than you can comprehend (does 7 terra-eletrovolts hitting 7 terra electrovolts mean shit to you? ...Me either) . This is enough energy to produce a micro-black hole -- something that is only theoretical. A micro-blackhole would radiate away shortly after its formation...in theory. But, it could also not evaporate and instead sink to the center of the Earth, due to their ability to pass through matter and the Earth's gravitational pull. As the LHC slams a few protons together every second, it would be creating millions of microscopic black holes a year, which could coalesce at the center of the Earth, and by 2012 have enough power to suck the entire Earth flat into nothingness.

Seriously. Now back to Carroll and "Jabberwocky"...

Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe

The poem wasn't entirely meaningless. In fact, "brillig" is 4pm (when you begin to broil things for dinner), "slithy toves" are lithe little creatures who live near sundials (fictive I know, but still holds meaning), "gyre and gimble" means to dig and "wabe" is a sundial's shadow.

If broiling is heating and or cooking -- which requires energy, like say, slamming protons together, and you've got imaginary creatures that live in the darkness of a sundial ("fictive" micro-holes that exist in the absence of sun) and they are digging into the Earth...then the set up is there -- the Jabberwocky is "Raganarock" and the answer to its defeat is coded in the rest of the poem. Carroll is literally mapping out the end of the world and the explanation of how to prevent it -- but who's "vorpal blade" will go "snicker snack?" Where is the "beamish boy?"

He doesn't exist, which is why I love Lewis Carroll.

The man could make something out of nothing and make it stick in popular culture -- something that's fun to try, but only one in a million can make it work...

See you in 2013.

*I might be making all this up.