Facts on Farts Brenna Lorenz

On average, a person produces about half a liter of fart gas per day, distributed over an average of about fourteen daily farts.

Posted by GeeTee at May 27, 2004 05:57 PM | TrackBack 0

Classical finally cracks the Internet CNET News.com

It was, in short, a musical video conference, held over the Internet. Not just your regular home Internet but Internet2, the next generation, with enough broadband capacity to transmit huge quantities of data, including CD-quality sound and DVD-quality images, at as much as 250 megabytes per second (more than 4,000 times the rate of a standard dial-up modem; more than 800 times that of a cable modem). Like the Internet at its inception, it is the province of universities and technology centers. All you need to join the system is academic accreditation and nearly $12,000 a year to pay for an affiliate membership.

From GoodShit

Posted by GeeTee at May 27, 2004 04:08 PM | TrackBack 0

Armageddon Almost Not Averted Moscow Times

To launch a Minuteman in those days, one had to "unlock" the missile by dialing in a code -- the equivalent of a safety catch on a handgun. However, Blair reports, the U.S. Strategic Air Command was worried that a bunch of sissy safety features might slow things down. It ordered all locks set to 00000000 -- and in launch checklists, reminded all launch officers like Blair to keep the codes there. "So the 'secret unlock code' during the height of the nuclear crises of the Cold War," Blair says, "remained constant at 00000000."

Posted by GeeTee at May 27, 2004 03:43 PM | TrackBack 0

Your Hummer. Rave

As you both looked around at us peons running around on this busy Monday, throwing your snide I-think-being-head-cheerleader-five-years-ago-still-makes-me-cool looks around, we all looked to you for some guidance as to how we too could actually be *such cunts* without speaking.

Posted by GeeTee at May 27, 2004 02:01 PM | TrackBack 0

A Tale of Two Writers

The common legacy of Greene and Singer is an art that art was driven not by action, which is Hollywood's ideal, but by an idea of human suffering and transcendence in morally ambiguous circumstances. Few writers today deal in such shades of grey. The overuse of irony and satire diminishes suffering and denies transcendence. The gimmick and the grotesque command attention. Simple, spell-binding storytelling is critically undervalued.

Posted by GeeTee at May 27, 2004 01:45 PM | TrackBack 0

Sex towers uber alles The Wilder Side of Sex - National Zoo| FONZ

Here at the local reef, having the ability to fertilize yourself is great if you’re immobile, like barnacles or coral polyps: You don’t need to depend on whatever mate happens to slither by. For spineless creatures on the go, being double-sexed often leads to orgies. Sea hares (Aplysia dactylomela) are snails without shells that are male in front and female behind, leading them to form erotic daisy chains that can involve a dozen or more animals at once. Slipper limpets (aptly named Crepidula fornicata) are male while free-swimming and female when they settle down on a rock. When a male swims by a female slipper limpet, he flops onto her to mate. If another male lands on top of him, the lower male turns female, and they clasp. And so on, and so on. Scientists have recorded up to 14 limpets at a time pancaked into towers of lust. Invertebrates take the prize for most sexes, genders, sex organs, and acrobatic means of coitus, but when it comes to vertebrate hermaphrodites, something is definitely fishy.

Hamlets (genus Hypoplectrus) are small tropical fish that sometimes are blue, but are certainly not melancholy. Like most reef fish they are hermaphrodites, but of the simultaneous persuasion. When two hamlets meet they don’t soliloquize, they pair and have a lovely time assuming one sex role and then the other. And pair they do. Hamlets hold the sex-shifting record, switching from one set of gonads to the other and back in 30 seconds or less, with an average of 14 spawns in one day. An amphibious Caribbean killifish called Rivulus marmoratus takes this even further: It doesn’t even look for a mate, but fertilizes itself. Rivulus is the only vertebrate known to science that can do this. But such creatures are an anomaly, a rare few species that are acrobatic and have the energy, will, and ability to haul around two separate reproductive tracts (not an easy proposition, evolutionarily speaking). Wouldn’t it be easier to start as one gender, and then carry the other in your wallet, just in case? Welcome to the world of the sequential hermaphrodites.

Posted by GeeTee at May 27, 2004 01:37 PM | TrackBack 0

DICKS versus LICKS I had lunch at DICKS today. It was more expensive than LICKS and not as good. LICKS is a franchise, which proves that mass produced LICKS can be better than home-made DICKS. I went to DICKS because I had a coupon for discount stuff from DICKS. But I probably won't go to DICKS again, because it's too much trouble.

Posted by GeeTee at May 27, 2004 01:20 PM | TrackBack 0

Cicadas The fucking things are everywhere -- and I mean everywhere. Walking around the District and its surrounding regions is basically like walking through an organic minefield -- you take a step and all of a sudden there's an explosion of wings, half of which are bound to fly into windows, or buildings, or cars, or dogs, or whatever else happens to be there. It doesn't matter -- these insects are so stupid that they can't even recognize when they're flying into a building, let alone a tree. No wonder they stay underground for 17 years of their lives.

Posted by at May 27, 2004 01:00 PM | TrackBack 0

It's Raining, by Vicente Aleixandre

This evening it's raining,
and my picture of you is raining.
The day falls open in memory.
You walked in.
I can't hear. Memory gives me nothing but your picture.
There only your kiss or the rain is falling.

Posted by GeeTee at May 15, 2004 07:09 PM | TrackBack 0

Why I am not a Painter, by Frank O'Hara

Why I am not a Painter

I am not a painter, I am a poet.
Why? I think I would rather be
a painter, but I am not. Well,

for instance, Mike Goldberg
is starting a painting. I drop in.
"Sit down and have a drink," he
says. I drink; we drink. I look
up. "You have SARDINES in it."
"Yes, it needed something there."
"Oh," I go and the days go by
and I drop in again. The painting
is going on, and I go, and the days
go by. I drop in. The painting is
finished. "Where's SARDINES?"
All that's left is just
letters, "It was too much," Mike says.

But me? One day I am thinking of
a color: orange. I write a line
about orange. Pretty soon it is a
whole page of words, not lines.
Then another page. There should be
so much more, not of orange, of
words, of how terrible orange is
and life. Days go by. It is even in
prose, I am a real poet. My poem
is finished and I haven't mentioned
orange yet. It's twelve poems, I call
it ORANGES. And one day in a gallery
I see Mike's painting, called SARDINES.

Frank O'Hara

Posted by GeeTee at May 15, 2004 07:08 PM | TrackBack 0

Overcast, by Charles Baudelaire

Overcast

Are they blue, gray or green?
Mysterious eyes
(as if in fact you were looking through a mist)
in alternation tender, dreamy, grim
to match the shiftless pallor of the sky.

That's what you're like- these warm white afternoons
which make the ravished heart dissolve in tears,
the nerves, inexplicably overwrought,
outrage the dozen mind.

Not always, though-sometimes
you're like the horizon when the sun
ignites our cloudy autumn-how you glow!
A sodden countryside in sudden rout,
turned incandescent by a changing wind.

Dangerous woman-demoralizing days!
Will I adore your killing frost as much,
and in that implacable winter, when it comes,
discover pleasures sharper than iron and ice?

Charles Baudelaire

Posted by GeeTee at May 15, 2004 07:06 PM | TrackBack 0

In Place Of A Curse, by John Ciardi

In Place Of A Curse

At the next vacancy for God, if I am elected,
I shall forgive last the delicately wounded
who, having been slugged no harder than anyone else,
never got up again, neither to fight back,
nor to finger their jaws in painful admiration.

They who are wholly broken, and they in whom
mercy is understanding, I shall embrace at once
and lead to pillows in heaven. But they who are
the meek by trade, baiting the best of their betters
with extortions of a mock-helplessness,

I shall take last to love, and never wholly.
Let them all in Heaven - I abolish Hell -
but let it be read over them as they enter:
"Beware the calculations of the meek, who gambled nothing
gave nothing, and could never recieve enough."

John Ciardi

Posted by GeeTee at May 15, 2004 07:04 PM | TrackBack 0

To... by Aleksandr Pushkin

I remember the wonderful moment:
Before me you appeared,
Like a passing vision,
Like a spirit of pure beauty.

In the fatigue of mournful hoplessness,
In the unrest of a noisy restless world,
Echoed in me your tender voice
And your dear features in my dreams.

The years passed. The rebellious gusts of the storm
Scattered the previous dreams,
And I forgot your tender voice,
Your heavenly features.

In the loneliness, in the gloom of excile
stretched quietly my days
Without divinity, without inspiration,
Without tears, without life, without love.

My soul began to awaken:
And lo again you appeared,
Like a passing vision,
Like a spirit of pure beauty.

And my heart is beating in ecstacy,
And once more for it is born anew
Divinity, and inspiration,
And life, and tears, and love.

(translated by Katherine Lawson)

Aleksandr Pushkin

Posted by GeeTee at May 15, 2004 07:00 PM | TrackBack 0