firewall

With news that China is unseating the US, who has reigned since 1890, as the largest producer of manufactured goods, the internet protocol czars of America are trying to make up for lost territory through licensing agreements and service contracts with aspirations of becoming the world cyber-police. Some really unbelievable things are happening as privacy and neutrality are being chipped away, repackaged and sold back at a premium. Like speculation with gold and currency markets, piracy-assessors apparently have calculated out the retail value lost to an uninspired modern single circulated for free on the internet represents a loss of revenue of some $2000 for the record label, which, imagine, could make a well-stocked and unsanctioned library worth well over $700,000,000,000--in one documented case, making that hard drive the single most valuable object in the world.  Some say the music and entertainment industry is on the verge of collapse, but I think it deserves to implode if there's little art or experimentation and mere reliance on re-runs.

but you can't have Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam, baked beans, Spam, Spam, Spam and Spam without Spam

Apparently as anger is directed more and more towards big oil, there's a growing movement to boycott its stations.  Government oil, however, overseas goes by a different name and under a different umbrella organization, so there's not much chance of me crossing that picket-line.  I call it government oil, like government cheese, because its heavily subsidized, and as a relic of the Cold War, VAT and environmental taxes are stripped off the top, to almost the point of being free though surely someone pays.  This martial art--that is, redirecting rage, is another way of exculpating man's own addiction to petroleum, no matter its source.  A boycott completely overlooks the fact that everything from linens, fibers, paints, bottles, jars, cans, cars, labels, computers, jewerly, appliances, solvent, laminate, and more are eiher fully made of oil, covered with a significant sheen of it and and fashioned and transported hither and yon with it.  Maybe the plumbing can be made safer and cleaner, but everything is soaking in it already.

honeycomb hide-out

This summer's a bit dreary by fits and starts, and one thing that I have noticed, but just barely, is the inconspicuous absence of bees despite everything being in full-bloom.  Usually, the flowers are heavy with buzzing but I don't think that I have seen a single honey bee yet.  There's been no headlines of scraping the bottom of the honey pot or bee-keepers getting desparate and wrangling moths but this certainly seems like a dire thing if cell-phone masts, sun-spot activity, WiFi, bluetooth, or subtle changes in the weather have affected the bees' navigation system and there's no mechanism for fertilizing plants and nothing to spur on general hardiness or evolution through cross-pollination.  Maybe they'll descend in great swarms to make up for lost time.

and keep the beaches shipwreck free

The Clash of the Titans remake came to our little second-run theater and though I was very excited to see this new version, I walked away a little disappointed.  The special effects were impressive and the monsters scarier but the Ray Harryshausen style of the original Medusa and Kraken were endearing, and so was Bubo--and rather than paying homage to the little clockwork owl from Hephaestus' forge and was like R2D2, they made fun of him, ever so briefly.  The acting in the original was much better, and Laurence Olivier is more believeable as Zeus.

gravity's rainbow

Apparently many of us were all had about the US forces' discovery of some Big Rock Candy Mountain of untapped wealth in Afghanistan.  It has been common knowledge since at least 1995 and the minerals have been buried in the earth for some millions of years before that.  Sometimes, I guess, news like this is recycled, like resuscitating some failing tourism campaign in fancy packaging.  Blood diamonds, get them while they're still cruel.  It is telling how the media touted this story as if it somehow justified the on-going war, but in reality it was another distraction that re-shuffled some imaginary wealth for a few hours.

plunder

It was announced that agents of the US-led occupation stumbled upon untold riches in Afghanistan in form of  previously unknown veins of copper, lithium and gold.  I am wondering how premature the release of this news was, since the Russians are far better pre-postioned to jump this claim, and what will it do for the only stable commodity on the world-markets, gold?  I am happy for the Afghanis if they can rebuild their country and undo the waves of damage wrought by the English, the Soviets, the Taliban and the Americans but I don't think such prospects will be surrendered so calmly.

mosaic mosaic

A woman at work was going back to the States permanently the other day, and before leaving she had asked several times to look through our photographs from Turkey.  On her last day, I finally brought my laptop to work and we looked through some of them, but it made me realize that I didn't have a good way to share pictures, short of an afternoon slide-show on the Wii, which is a lot of fun.  I don't do bookface and I don't use one of these photo-sharing sites.  But thinking back to another farewell, I remembered that a computer-technician had made a mosaic portrait for the woman who was leaving made up of all her former coworkers.  H and I take so many pictures and there has not really been a forum or occasion for all of them.  I found this pretty neat application that will remake an image into a mosaic of selected pictures.  This tile mosaic from Hagia Sophia contains 10 000 little images from our Istanbul vacation.  I'll have to fiddle with the settings and the target composition to sort out a better, wider collection and so its not a lot of microscopic pictures of ceilings and concrete but this was fun to do.

swift justice

Recently, the German high court in Erfurt ruled that the summary dismissal of a cashier with some thirty years tenure at the super-market for pilfering a few bottle deposit coupons worth a euro and change was grossly disproportionate to the crime.  The proceedings lasted for some time before a verdict was reached, but right away I noticed that the check-out girls in Bad Karma, our fair city, and elsewhere now have been tutored to put the deposit coupon (Pfandbon) aside, wedge it in the cash-register like it was a fifty euro bill, until they're done ringing up (this was done more casually everywhere just last week), that was intended for payment so there's no argument on the matter of change back.