Is our children learning?

OMZG!!!Professors destroy Western Civilisation

Zombie studies is now on the curriculum at Baltimore University.
The new course, which promises to "get you ready for a zombie apocalypse", invites students to devour classic zombie films and comics.
Instead of essays, they write horror scripts or draw storyboards for their ideal monster movie.
The minor class, titled English 333, has already been dubbed "Zombie 101" by the Baltimore Sun newspaper.

Not that I'm going for cheap sensationalism or nuthin'

Dogged persistence

You now how it is when you have a really good idea i.e. "why don't we design a robo-pet that is a drinks dispenser" and everyone says "Great, put it to the projects committee and get it approved". So you do and some people say "Well it would be good if it played music too" and other people say "Incense burners are coming back in" and I say "I thought that there were muffins at these meetings?" because it is not my vision of Laddie the Helpful Pet.
And then the Product Design people say "You want it covered in Velvet? Would former packing crates be orlright? we got a ton of them"
And then you start sobbing and looking for the Gin bottle only to find that it's inside Zappy Your Party Animal Friend and you don't know the access code.

Heads up! Cool Kids

Here at Riddled Lifestyle ( a subsidiary of Crafar Farms Inc. Ltd., Shanghai) we are on the cutting border of the leading edge. So we are pretty hep cats.
Focus group target research has shown that what "the kids" want is Zardoz but Mums and Dads there's no need to feel outgrouped on this one.With new wonder 'Headgrow' from Riddled Research there is scope for the whole family to enjoy the ownership experience!
Sign up today and your own former convict head will be winging it's way to your door step.
No responsibilities for eating accidents is taken and actual results may differ from those shown.

Poem

I saw the shadow mountain.
On the horizon,
it looked fragile.
An eggshell portrait.
I wondered how this thing
of light and air.
Could stand for the eons,
that it has.
Has it looked like this before?
and what those who saw it,
then, thought it was showing them.
Because I thought it was a hopeful thing.
To say "look, there is still
beauty in this world
beyond your situation"
Maybe it is a mirror to peoples concerns
and they would see the translucency
as impermanence?
Maybe I should just
admire the beauty
like  water for my soul.
Not think that it's there for me,
especially.
As I then did.

Like marble statues all with gold inlaid

For your delectation I bring you a sculpture in bullshit by Sam Mahon. Sam is one of the good guys and cow manure is not his usual medium.

Here is a sculpture that should have been carved in cowshit. Instead the artist opted for bronze-painted plaster-of-paris, a slightly less evanescent medium, but still suggestive of a hope on the artist's part that the result would not linger around to stink up his reputation. It was commissioned for the 1940 Centennial Exhibition, a time when Best International Practice for public art leaned towards the style known as Totalitarian Kitsch, and the NZ arts establishment was determined not to fall behind the German,¹ Italian or Soviet² states by allowing a Kitsch Heroic Nude gap to open.

The dude with one blade broken off his propellor beanie doing his celebrated Statue of Liberty impression -- always a hit at parties -- is Kupe the Navigator, a culture hero known to about half the iwi of pre-European New Zealand.³ In most of the tribal accounts, Kupe killed a friend and eloped with his wife, but 1940 was a puritanical time so the sculptor has opted for a more morally-edifying version where Kupe's lady friend pointing in three directions was the virtuous Ms. Te Apārangi. The pyramidal composition called for a third figure so the sculptor has invented the figure of Pekahourangi, at the bottom right, who is old and wise but too feeble to stand up erect like Kupe.

We know now that the mid-century version of national mythology (featuring a settlement of NZ by a Great Fleet in about 1350) is unmitigated ahistorical shite, fabricated by an ethnologist who distorted the available oral traditions to fit his preconceived picture, with the help of a Māori informant who had converted to Mormonism and who was committed to the idea that the Māori were one of the Lost Tribes of Israel.ª Kupe has been relegated from the role of a master navigator who preceded and instigated the Great Fleet by bearing news of NZ's existence back to the homeland, down to a minor part as an amalgam of several figures who led migrations of people from one part of NZ to another.

Evidently these amendments to the previously-fixed mainstays of cultural certainty were too much for the old farts of the Wellington establishment, and in 2000 they came up with the idea of dragging that painted-plaster sculptural group out from the basement where it had been moldering in decent obscurity and CASTING IT IN BRONZE like proper totalitarian art. Being all wealthy people, they convinced someone else to pay for this, and there it is now, on the waterfront, affirming their right to keep romantic lies within the national consciousness. Also a SYMBOL of our shared commitment to fabricated traditions, philistine tastes, and dishonesty in materials.

1 & 2

Is anyone surprised that this style of art has the approval of Ayn Rand and her followers?

³ New Zealand by 1940 was going through a process that will be familiar to Native Americans: once all their land had been grabbed so the Māori were no threat to European settlers, and the only thing they had left of value was their culture, the Europeans set about cherry-picking bits of that as well, to build into their own collective identity.

ª Hanson's essay on the process of fabrication is interesting for the first two thirds, before it name-drops Derrida and promptly spirals into gibberish about sign-substitutions.

----------------------------------------

There is a whole nother kettle of worms attached to this story, involving the Celtic New Zealand crowd. These are the nimrods who cling to the old mid-century story in which Kupe was the first Polynesian to visit New Zealand (rather than a later wanderer from one part to another), so when the traditions have him encountering people in the course of his explorations, this becomes proof that New Zealand already contained pre-Polynesian inhabitants. Who must be CELTIC.

It is a sordid story, marred by politicians battening onto the whole prior-occupancy notion (the argument is that it relieves New Zealanders who are wealthy because their immediate ancestors seized land here from any debt to the New Zealanders of Polynesian descent whose immediate ancestors had owned that land). On the other hand, it is also enlivened by characters such as Martin Doutré, who adheres to a kind of New-age Archaeology where you discover the Celtic past of a landscape by choosing random landmarks and measuring the distance between them -- much easier than actually excavating sites.

Worst community-service sentence EVAH.

Yes, young lady? If you are coming door-to-door collecting old clothes for charity, then I fear that the only shabby worn-out old clothes around here are the ones I'm wearing.

I am illustrating the Fable of the Grasshopper and the Ants.

Yes?

The grasshopper distracted me with dancing and stridulating, so I didn't notice while the ants quietly unraveled my clothes and made off with them, fibre by fibre.

I'm surprised that they find the time, what with the waging-war-on-each-other and the whole being-parasitised-by-fungi thing.

Please tell me that this is a joke

From the Institute of Megalithic Research:*
I set out searching for "Kupe + great fleet", checking up on a specifically New Zealand tradition of bullshit, but this has rendered my argument invalid.

Dr. R.M. de Jonge's most recent report was only a month ago. Long may he continue his research!

* Also known as the Institute for Megalithic Research.

Filler

A look inside the Riddled beer fridge.
Leftovers from last weekend's Beerfest Beervana.

Clash of Civilisations for Dummies Ants

Lecture 1:

1. We are so numerous that we are starving.
2. Therefore we must not cut down our numbers but encourage large families in order to become still more numerous and starving.
3. When we are so numerous and starving as all that, obviously we have a right to take other people's syrup. Besides, we shall by then have a numerous and starving army.

Lecture 2:

1. We are more numerous than they are, therefore we have a right to their syrup.
2. They are more numerous than we are, therefore they are wickedly trying to steal our syrup.
3. We are a mighty race and have a natural right to subjugate their puny one.
4. They are a mighty race and are unnaturally trying to subjugate our inoffensive one.
5. We must attack in self-defence.
6. They are attacking us by defending themselves.
7. If we do not attack them today, they will attack us tomorrow.
8. In any case we are not attacking them at all: we are offering them incalculable benefits.

From the Mailbox

Date: Fri, 27 Aug 2010 23:43:49 +0900
To: ASSC-L@LISTSERV.UH.EDU, visionlist@visionscience.com, cvnet@mail.ewind.com, neuromail@brain.riken.jp
Subject: CVNet - CALL FOR ASSC15 SYMPOSIUM & TUTORIAL PROPOSALS
X-Antivirus: AVG for E-mail 9.0.851 [271.1.1/3099]

CALL FOR ASSC15 SYMPOSIUM & TUTORIAL PROPOSALS
Symposium and tutorial proposal deadline: October 30th, 2010.

The 15th annual meeting of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness will be held in Kyoto, Japan from Thursday 9th - Sunday 12th, June 2011. The Program committee invites proposals for symposia and tutorials on any topic relevant to the scientific study of consciousness.

Tutorials will be held in parallel sessions on the morning and afternoon of June 24th 2010.

Please send all proposals along with submission requirements to assc15@pri.kyoto-u.ac.jp by October 30th.

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Many difficult-to-articulate phenomena are best studied in the negative: that is, by identifying the variables that produce the absence of the phenomenon in question.
With that in mind, I propose a symposium in which we shall produce the absence of consciousness in various ways, including but not limited to GABA agonists such as malt whisky.