Brian Robertson is the friend that I’ve had longest in my life. We lived together in a God-Damned Hippie Commune in Houston during the Seventies. We both were part of the collective that ran the Inlet Drug Crisis Center, and the GDHC was comprised of staff there. He played folk music at places like Sand Mountain in his spare time. (Have I mentioned that I generally despise folk music?) Soon enough, he got the Blues. Lotsa memories there, many of them blurred by time and psychoactive molecules.

It would take too long to go through all of our history, but Brian for many years made his living as a bluesman in Austin, both solo and in bands, and he more than once generously dragged me up on stage with him. He would even let me play solo breaks, though he is a far superior guitar player. And harmonica player. And keyboardist. I never sang at those gigs, of course, because, as good a friend as Brian is, he’s not actually insane.

Here is some tasty slide work of his on SoundClick. You may want to especially try out ‘Big Ass Buick’ for the slide and some understated harp.

He’s also the author of, among other books, the ‘Little Blues Book’, which is an excellent primer on the subject, with great illustrations by R. Crumb, who is perhaps the most famous underground artist from the Sixties.

Brian’s always been a serious nethead, and recently, he’s been fooling around with a web site where he does his thing with PhotoShop. His thing can be pretty damn twisted. You should be forewarned that much of it is politically-oriented, and that Brian’s opinions can be far less gentle than those usually expressed by the kindly souls here at EOB. Click the pic for more of VisualBlip:

I’m sometimes not a normal friend. I go through lengthy periods of hermitosis, when I don’t make much effort to keep up with the people that I love. It’s not about them, it’s about me, and it seems to be a familial trait. It’s cost me quite a few relationships over the decades, because, when I come out of the hermit phase, I’m embarrassed to get back in touch with people. Which means it’s even longer, and harder, as time goes on, to reconnect with them.

Brian’s done a good job of ignoring that flaw in my character. He called me this week, out of the never-never, after us not seeing each other for far too long. We chatted for hours. I’m looking forward to hanging out again with him and his lovely wife Melanie, later this month. He’s one of my few adoptive brothers, and I missed him.

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Pic Credit to Brian Robertson — All rights reserved.

This was the post I had planned to do last week — before cats and vertigo got in the way. 

As some you know, The Dude started a company about two and a half years ago called Junction Point Studios. 

About half of all new businesses fail.  

When The Dude was trying to decide whether or not to leave gainful employment, I stood behind him saying, “Jump. Jump! JUMP!”  I felt then, and I still do, that starting his own company at that time was the right thing to do. 

That’s not to say I haven’t felt like an absolute schmuck many times since then. 

The new business thing has been really scary.   More times than I can say, I’ve worried that we made a terrible mistake.  That giving up a steady decent salary with benefits was colossally stupid.  (And that telling someone to, “Jump. Jump! JUMP!” may have been a horrible thing to do.  My guilt at such moments was massive.)

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From our frequent commenter LDA.

Each year, farmers in the town of Inakadate in Aomori prefecture create works of crop art by growing a little purple and yellow-leafed kodaimai rice along with their local green-leafed tsugaru-roman variety. This year’s creation — a pair of grassy reproductions of famous woodblock prints from Hokusai’s 36 Views of Mount Fuji — has begun to appear (above). It will be visible until the rice is harvested in September.

link

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Despite my notification that there would be Jumper publicity at ComicCon, looks like they couldn’t pull it together in time.

Sean Dudas, Fox’s vice president of national publicity, stated, “Fox is not going to be able to participate in Comic-Con this year. The material wasn’t ready and we only want to go out when we can put our best foot forward. Obviously, we will have to find other ways to get materials out to the fans and hopefully those will be ready soon.”

Two hundred and thirty-one years ago tomorrow, Colonel James Paterson, adjutant to General William Howe of His Majesty’s army, was admitted to General George Washington’s headquarters at No. 1 Broadway in New York City.

Col. Paterson was attempting to deliver a letter from his commander’s brother, Admiral Lord Richard Howe – a letter addressed to “George Washington, Esq., etc., etc.” This letter supposedly contained an offer of peace terms . . . because British and Hessian troops under General Howe were gathering on Staten Island, and more troops were arriving almost daily on Lord Howe’s ships in New York Harbor. If the Continental Army did not surrender, New York might soon see the same sort of bloodshed that Boston had seen at Bunker Hill.

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When I was a kid in elementary school, I used to get in trouble for reading. It seems absurd. But when I was ten, I could read with utter concentration. I could remain immersed in Bullfinch’s Mythology when the television was on and not know that Samantha was twinkling her nose at people. If Alex and the Black Stallion had been separated and Alex had lost his memory, I never knew my mother was calling for me. After I raced through whatever work we were doing in class and opened At the Back of the North Wind, I was oblivious to the teacher calling our attention and starting the next lesson. So Mr. Fish, my fourth grade teacher, used to take my library book from me and put it on the chalk rail of the blackboard, close to the door. I could pick it up at the end of the day. Once my book had been confiscated, I was forced to fall back on drawing horses, which probably says way too much about what kind of girl I was.

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Okay, I’m a few days late on my Saturday post.  But I have some really good reasons:

Bob (New Cat’s new name) spent Friday, Saturday, and Sunday at two different emergency clinics. He’s okay, but for about forty-eight hours it looked scary.

There were potentially frightening X-rays, the possibility of his heart being enlarged, terrible anemia, and an odd lab result on one of his liver readings. After more tests, his heart is fine and the one odd liver value is coming down. His red blood cell count is back to normal. He’s home and tormenting Dave (the other tabby) so all there is good.

Then on Sunday, I had vertigo. I’m not talking about, “Ooo, I’m a little light-headed.” I’m talking feeling as if I’d drunk four bottles of tequila, got into one of those human-sized gyroscopes, and then taken a roller coaster ride. To make things worse, I hurled during the urgent care exam. It was mortifying.

I’ve never experienced anything like it. At one point, I couldn’t move my eyes without sending the room into an impressive axis-tilting whirligig. It was one of the worst twenty-four hours of my life.

I couldn’t walk straight. The Dude had to help me walk into the clinic. During the exam, the doctor said he had to ask if I was intoxicated because my physical behavior was so screwed up. (He didn’t really think I was drunk, btw.) I would have been dead of alcohol poisoning long before I drank enough to reach this stage of incapacitation.

There wasn’t much for them to do. They sent me home, and The Dude went out for Meclizine. I took some and, amazingly enough, felt well enough to get out of bed and go lie down on the couch.

Monday I was better, but my balance was still off. I’m good today, just tired. I’m going to the “Dizzy Clinic” next week to start some physical therapy.

I’ve been through this before. I had Benign Paroxysmal Positional Vertigo. My doctor explained this as the rocks in your head going where they’re not supposed to. They basically treat your head like those kids’ puzzles where you try to get the ball bearings into the little holes. It’s less fun than it sounds.

And that’s why I didn’t get my post done this weekend.

You got a problem with that? Come on over to my house. I’ll spin around a couple of times, and we’ll see what happens . . .

Sometimes the world is so postmodern it hurts my brain. This is a group called The Wrong Trousers (Wallace and Gromit!) which performs a version of Video Killed the Radio Star on harp, mandolin and stand up bass. Thanks to Karen Meisner for the link.

One of the things my father and I have in common is a love of kitchen equipment. Pots. Pans. Pie crimpers and ramekins and really handsome mixing bowls. When I was a kid we had a catalogue of kitchen supplies and gear that my father and I would pore over it together, admiring things we were unlikely ever to possess. A couple of times when we were both in New York we’d go downtown to restaurant supply stores and wander through the aisles, examining the stainless steel and the cast iron and the industrial-strength mixers and pasta machines. “Look at the design on this!” “That’s one hell of a handsome bowl.” “Who thought this up?”

Now that we’ve sold the Barn, we can afford to redo our kitchen, which was last fixed up sometime in the early 70s. Can I tell you how I rejoice at the notion of four reliable burners and an oven that reaches and holds the desired heat? But redoing the kitchen will take time and thought and aggravation as well as money. Oh, and patience, never my hallmark. So, in the meantime, I’ve bought myself a toy, a sort of Promissory Token of my someday kitchen: a stockpot. A twenty-quart stockpot.

When I make chili or soup I like to make a lot at once so that I can freeze it for those evenings when I have to feed people and am uninspired. Until I got the new stockpot, I used the largest pot I had–my canning pot, a 24-quart black-speckled-enamel steel pot meant for immersing multiple jars in a hot water bath. It’s a fine pot for its purpose, but not so good for chili, since the thinness of the metal pretty much insures scorching, which adds an unintended and unappealing flavor. So yesterday I made enough chili for dinner for the family, plus five more dinners (all tucked away in the freezer in the basement). No scorched flavor! I was moved to make bread to go with the chili, and the house smelled several varieties of gorgeous all afternoon long.

I do drive my husband a little crazy, since (except when baking, which has certain chemical requirements which, unmet, will guarantee failure) I am an extremely improvisational cook. Chili, chez moi, includes meat, chilis, beans, onion and garlic. It can also include, in no particular order or amount, green pepper, carrot, dried apricots, basil, cumin, thyme, beer, wine, cinnamon, rosemary, lemon peel, olives, and whatever else happens to be around the house. So the taste of my chili (sans scorch) varies from batch to batch. I am married to a gustatorial conservative: if he likes something, he wants it the same way it was last time and the six times before. No matter how much he likes each batch of chili, he has to grapple with the fact that the next batch may well be different. Not wildly different–I’m not making calves-liver-and-grape-jelly chili, the fundamental things still apply–but it’s different. So the upside of the new stockpot is that I can make more unscorched chili at once, and the man can have five or six meals of the same chili before he has to get used to a new batch.

With my shiny, new stockpot everybody wins! How often in life can you say that?

We humans can’t help but be equal parts fascinated and repelled by the concept of the alien. We live in a universe so large we can’t even begin to grok how big it is: a universe chock full of suns (did you know that if it weren’t for interstellar dust and the fact that our universe is expanding at such a rapid rate, our sky would be so full of stars we wouldn’t even be able to see space? That it would be blazingly, blindingly bright, day and night? Sort of an extension of Asimov’s famous story, “Nightfall.” Imagine how different our concept of our universe might be then!), many of which appear likely to be chock full of planets.

SF writer Fred Saberhagen, who died recently after a two-year battle with cancer, came up with some of the most imaginative concepts in the literature. Best known, perhaps, is his Berserker series. In his books, self-replicating machine intelligences travel throughout the galaxy, hunting out and destroying biological life wherever they find it.

The series is an one of the earliest and most definitive appearances of the Singularity in science fact or fiction: the notion that an artificial intelligence(s) would eventually develop free will, outpace us intellectually, and render humans either dead or irrelevant. Robert Charles Wilson toys with many different aspects of the Singularity, simulated life, and consciousness; e.g., in Darwinia and Spin. Wil McCarthy’s Bloom is another excellent examination of the concept, using nanotech/ programmable matter to create a Singular super-intelligence. Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time has one of the most malevolent alien/computer intelligences ever imagined.

Many other SF authors have made use of this notion. But it is SF writer and computer scientist Vernor Vinge in particular who is known for bringing the concept of the Singularity into modern discussions of technological progress. His excellent science fiction novel, A Fire Upon the Deep, and many of his other works, pivot on this concept. (By the way, I’m mentioning all these books because they are really good—go read them!) It is difficult to write an SF novel involving space, nanotech, or computer technology these days, without coming within shouting distance of the Singularity in one form or another. (This is partly, I believe, because we are in the heliopause of the Singularity already.)

Some SF writers, who aren’t interested in writing about the Singularity, are irritated by this fact, but I think grappling with this concept is resulting in some of the best hard SF in recent memory (see above examples). Check out Charles Stross’s Accelerando and Chris Moriarty’s Spin Control, for instance (I can’t stop recommending good SF books! Help!)

The concept of the Singularity has a clear association with the question of whether a superior alien intelligence originating elsewhere in the universe—if there are such beings—might come around someday, and harbor ill intent toward us. After all, we have daily evidence of our own perfidy toward each other; it’s hard to have confidence that a technologically superior race would show mercy toward us.

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Tonight’s Flash Fiction is brought to you by the letter ‘R’ and the number ‘11’. I surmise that it’s NSFW, so you’ll have to go below the cut for it.

It took me about an hour and a half to write and edit it. An adolescent part of me thinks it might be a good idea to challenge EOB posters and readers to do some Flash here.

For those submitted by other than The Seven, who can create their own damn posts, I’ll be happy to create pages here and do posts linking to them, with permanent links out of our Downloads page. Send me an e-mail at eatourbrains-at-gmail.com.

No money, you greedy little narcissists. Creative Commons licensing, which is what we all operate under here.

To qualify as Flash, it must be under 2,000 words. The shorter the better, in this particular game. Mine is exactly 500 words. More points for me.

People might even make comments about your efforts. Remember, there is no Teh Suck here. There is only early draft and learning experience.

On to ‘Memories’:

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This bright Sunday morning we have on the menu some hyper-gravitational rock and roll from the best redneck country band on the scene. Try a hot plate full of ‘Don’t Need You’:

Cross Canadian Ragweed broke out big in 2004, after relentlessly touring for about a decade. Damn near every student at A&M loves them, and has seen them live a dozen times. They’ve been here a bunch, including at this year’s Chilifest in Snook, which is right down the road from College Station. Chilifest is the redneck version of Woodstock.

I’ve missed CCR so far, but plan to remedy that lack as soon as possible. It’s getting harder, because they used to play small venues for cheap, and now they’re headliners.

I have a memory of extended father-daughter exaltation, listening to their ‘Purple Album’ with She Who is Awesome on a soft Friday evening, gliding through the hills and brush outside Dripping Springs on the way to a tree-worshipping neopagan weekend. It’s a classic road-trip album.

They’re far from being a one-trick pony, though. Their song ‘Broken’ will hurt you. I can’t find it on the net, nor can I find their signature song, ‘Boys from Oklahoma’, which is the rowdiest song about smokin’ dope that I’ve ever heard. You might try creating a CCR station at Pandora. I listen to mine often.

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Here are some more CCR vids:

Sick and Tired

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Fightin’ For

Constantly

Alabama

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Folks may recall that Steve and I have switched days this week. For my weekly post, here are a couple of fun things I’ve found while cruising the web.

First, an interesting post on Cognitive Daily about human perception. Apparently we can recognize objects with very little input. By putting dots at key parts of the body, as if they were lights on our elbows, knees, hips, and so on, then animating them, scientists have shown that the figures are clearly identifiable as human — and even things like their gender, level of anxiety, and size are discernable.

According to CogDaily scientists, children as young as five are able to recognize a collection of moving dots as human, dog, bird, and so on. The still images are more difficult to decipher, for both children and adults.

This site allows you to play with the dot skeleton animations. Fun!

And while we are on the subject of human perception and identifying objects with limited information at your disposal, here is something with an even higher coolth factor : astronomers who have collected tons of data on galaxies are inviting the public to help them classify galaxies as either spiral or elliptical.

It’s addictive — like a video game! — and it’s in the name of science. Apparently they have been overwhelmed by the response. I have been playing for over an hour now, and had to wrench myself away to come post about it.

Check it out.