Andysocial

Closing Statement in the Court Martial of Sergent Kist

2011-04-06T00:06:00.001+10:00

Beware,
If you from here must damn what I did there,
You too would've faltered on that tower,
Beneath the wreath of that thousand-yard stare.
Will you measure the sins of one hour
Against ten years of duty served with care?
A day's courage to a second's error
One minute foul against four fortnights fair

Have care
Then, my judges, when you pass your sentence,
If you would light the truth 'neath this affair,
That you judge the crimes not their repentance.
Do you think fear drove me away from there?
Rendered still a loyalty whose currents
Carried my soul through ten years of warfare?
Then you condense my disobedience.

Though where
At last I fled, of this become aware:
My betrayal came long before the flight.
It ended when at last I fled from there.
Cowardice? Dereliction due to fright?
Would that I had at once fled down that stair.
But can mere brute fear shut out the sharp light
Of ten years service as a legionnaire?

That stare
Did not scare but enthralled; it overawed.
No clearer centre had the world but there;
No sight more vivid, no more shining gaud.
The world fell deaf and dumb before its flare.
If I had banged the bell, would it have drawled?
It laid your every civil impulse bare
And there at once you knew them for a fraud.

And there
It appeared, convulsing atop the stair.
Throwing that stare first at me, then downward
At my poor charges below in the square.
Its weight pulled the feathered heavens earthward.
They bent around its edge, first bled of their
Blue, then breaking outward at its halyard
To plates of colour wreathed about its stare.

It dare
Impose itself despite our sky's outcries;
Despite our foursquare tower, walls and prayer;
And every elaborate enterprise
Of civility to send it elsewhere.
Our guise of redemption could not disguise
Us before those special eyes; it saw bare
The I, with those specialised, special eyes.

Breaks

2011-03-04T21:57:00.003+11:00

They have no time in the landscape of E-Prime
A man who wanders for years returns in the fury of his youth
A long-strider patrols the plain
He breaks the line of the horizon
And his voice sounds like a squeal of breaks

Crescendo to an error

2011-03-02T17:25:00.000+11:00

A certain private parking area near my brother's apartment includes fold-up pedestals that the spaces' owners can upraise to defend them from other motorists. Each pedestal folds up into the middle of its parking space, where you lock it into place with a key. The distance between pedestals in adjacent spaces then becomes just one pedestal diameter less than the width of the space. Now instead of just blocking your space, the interloping vehicle blocks two spaces:

http://www.sevenextraeyes.org/andy-social/cars.jpg

Hive pieces

2011-02-16T06:35:00.004+11:00

This shows a set of pieces with cartoon artwork for the board game Hive. To turn them into a real set, I recommend sticking them to hexagonal bathroom tiles. Each set should contain three ants, three grasshoppers, one queen bee, two beetles and two spiders (making twenty two pieces in total).

http://www.sevenextraeyes.org/andy-social/hivepieces.jpg

Peter Temple's Truth

2011-02-14T16:56:00.005+11:00

Peter Temple's Truth reads like an Australian television miniseries. You can even see where they would show the tits.

The novel's beauty comes from the vividness of its writing. We leave it with afterimages of "sharp-toothed skulls" and "beer cartons blown flat against the fences" still glowing behind our mind's I. We can still hear the footsteps on the "gap-planked verandah" and the "rip and flap of a loose truck tarp in the nearest yard".

The plot that it adorns follows well-worn lines. Police detectives with personal problems swear their way through an unfolding series of homicides. As he searches for truth behind the city's mean streets and the life he lives on them, Temple's protagonist guides us through a bloodier, grimier congener of the Melbourne we know. It leaves behind an imprint, marked in luminol.

Abstract

2011-02-13T00:12:00.004+11:00

The various possible three-valued propositional logics of implication validate different formulae. For example, depending on the truth-table for their implicational connective, some validate the axiom of contraction while others do not¹.

Thus for any pairing of a set of implicational formulae with a single implicational formula one may ask, "does every three-valued logic of formulae that validates all the formulae in that set also validate that single formula?". For example, does every possible three-valued logic that validates both the axiom of identity and the axiom of prefixing also validate the axiom of permutation²?

If we restrict ourselves to nonempty three-valued logics of formulae whose truth-tables for the implicational connectives preserve the classical evaluations for true and false, we can view this as a relation that holds between a set of formulae and a single formula whenever every such logic that validates each of the formulae in the set also validates that single formula. It turns out that, according to established criteria for what makes a logic, this relation qualifies as a logic itself³. For any set of formulae together with any single formula, this logic countenances the consequence relation from the set to the single formulae if and only if every logic that validates all of the formulae in the set also validates that single formula. It gives us a logic of the relationships between logics.

Footnotes:

The classical tautology, '(p -> (p -> q)) -> (p -> q)' (an instance of the W schema).
The classical tautologies,
- 'p -> p' (identity) (instance of the I schema)
- '(q -> r) -> ((p -> q) -> (p -> r))' (prefixing) (instance of the B schema)
- '(p -> (q -> r)) -> (q -> (p -> r))' (permutation) (instance of the C schema)
It qualifies as a consequence relation characterized by the family of nonempty three-valued logics of formulae whose truth-tables for the implicational connective preserve the classical evaluations for true and false. For criteria for logical consequence relations, see D. Shoesmith and T. Smiley Multiple-conclusion Logic (Cambridge: Cambridge, 1978).

Flat inspection

2011-02-07T12:25:00.006+11:00

Bendy crept upon the moth. He moved his limbs one at a time, between clock ticks, splitting each step into tiny motions. He had to keep calm; if he yielded to the temptation to dash, the bell would jingle on his flea collar and scare the moth away. Three more inches and he could pounce.

"Bzzzzzzzzzzt!"

The buzzer sheared the roof off the night.

The moth shot to the ceiling. Bendy screamed in protest.

"Bzzzzzzzzt bzz bzz bzzzzzzzzzt"

His mistress darted out of her bedchamber to the intercom.

"You only have to press the butt-"

"Bzzzzzzzt"

"The door switch doesn't work. I'll come down."

She wore her bells on the ends of purple dreadlocks. Bendy listened to them tinkle as she climbed down the staircase, paused at the door and the climbed back up again.

She returned with a big, clomping man who smelled like the outside: the Allergy Man. He had a big, pink baby face and a plump body. Dressed in a floral shirt, he looked like a cherub on vacation.

"The woman in number eleven hasn't come home," she said, "can we put Bendy in your car?"

"I don't think he likes me," said the Allergy Man.

"No, he likes you," she said.

"He always claws my shins," said the Allergy Man.

"See," she said, "he likes you. Hold his cat box up while I squeeze him in."

She picked Bendy up. He purred in satisfaction; nobody had picked up the Allergy Man. But wait - now she lowered him towards the cat box! Bendy grasped the top edge with his front feet. As she tried to swing him into the box, he grasped the bottom edge with his back feet. The Allergy Man shook the box. She tried to pry his paws away with her free hand, but each time she got hold of one Bendy twisted another loose and grabbed back hold of the box. At last, her discipline broke and she lunged for his limbs with both hands. Bendy squirmed loose and bolted for the bedchamber.

The Allergy Man dropped the box and clomped after him. Bendy hid under the bed.

"I can't see him," he called out.

He stepped up next to the bedstead. Bendy dashed forward and clawed his shins.

"Christ," he said, flinching back.

He clomped out of the room.

Would they try to sweep him out with a broom?

Bendy's mistress entered and set a plate by the door. On top sat half a wheel of camembert.

Did they think he'd fall for so barefaced a trap? Bendy stayed under the bed and watched his cheese.

The Allergy Man appeared at the door. He stooped down, picked up the plate and ate some of the cheese! When he set it back down, only two-thirds of it remained.

Now Bendy's mistress came in and nibbled away another piece. Bendy whined in anguish.

The Allergy Man returned and took another bite. They meant to eat Bendy's whole cheese!

Bendy dashed forward. He'd begun to devour the cheese when hands clenched him under the shoulders.

The Allergy Man carted Bendy back to the foyer. His mistress toted the cat box, but now she peered out through the windowpane at the parking lot below.

"I think I see Laura's car," she said, "She might see you on the stairs. I've still got the cardboard box the microwave came in. We'll have to tape him in."

She ran to the other room and came back with a packing box and tape.

"Will he just go to sleep once it gets dark inside?" said the Allergy Man.

"No," she said.

The Allergy Man flung him into the box and held the flaps while she taped it closed. It went black inside the box. Down below, he could hear somebody unlocking the front door.

The box jolted upwards. It pivoted to the side and then lurched forwards, sending Bendy sliding across the bottom. Then he heard the Allergy Man's shoes on the staircase.

Bendy clawed at the side of the box. Soon he could scratch right through to the Allergy Man's chest.

"Ouch! Jesus," cried the Allergy Man.

The box stopped.

"Oh, hello Laura," he said.

Bendy leaped sideways, hurling his weight against the side of the box. The box pitched sidelong and started to topple over. Then with a lurch it swiveled back to the other side and started to topple in the opposite direction. Bendy skidded across the floor. The box dipped and at last heaved back to the horizontal.

"I almost dropped your microwave," the Allergy Man called out for no reason.

Bendy slashed at the Allergy Man's chest with both claws. The footsteps started to run. The box rolled a quarter turn forward, rotating the gash Bendy had made to the top. Bendy clawed at the new side. He sliced through the cardboard and then the tape. At last he struck the Allergy Man's stomach. The box rolled through another quarter turn.

Now the footfalls fell on gravel. By the time Bendy clawed through the newest side, he heard them ringing against concrete.

Torn through in three places, the box began to crumple. A hole opened in the side as wide as Bendy's head. He could escape!

He plunged his head and forelegs through the hole, but a hand came up and forced him back inside. Bendy whirled around. Slashing the hand with his hind claws, he ran for a new breach in the other side. Now the other hand came up to force him back, but the whole box had started to collapse, he would soon find a way free.

As the last of the tape gave way, the Allergy Man swung open the door to his car. He threw Bendy inside. He held Bendy at bay with his throat while he shut the door.

The Allergy Man sighed with relief. He dug a rag out of the glove box and dabbed at his wounds. Bendy raced around inside, but could find no escape. He scratched at the door, but no one opened it.

Bendy hid beneath the seats. Minutes later he emerged, purring, to huddle up against the Allergy Man. Together they sat in the dark.

As they waited, the Allergy Man started to splutter and sneeze. He began wheezing and his eyes turned red. His eyelids swelled up.

Bendy meowed for his mistress. He watched headlights passing on the road. Twice he thought he heard her bells among the sounds of traffic.

When she appeared at last, she had a plate in her hand. She had brought his cheese! He purred with affection as she carried him back to his house.

That night, he slept on the Allergy Man's head.

Reassessment

2011-01-07T08:01:00.001+11:00

Several Christmases ago, I caught Karen home from work watching a home improvement programme that showed you how to build a procession of plywood reindeer for your lawn. You sawed the antlers and the reindeer out as separate pieces and then nailed the former on to the latter.

Imagine yourself sawing out plywood reindeer in your garage on a Sunday afternoon. What a sense of purposelessness must assail you. You had dreams once. How did it come to this?

Tiririca

2010-12-27T16:26:00.007+11:00

By subjecting Francisco Oliveira to a literacy exam, Brazil's National Congress has only enriched the metaphor. Now, instead of a clown in congress, they have a semiliterate clown in congress¹. For a medley of ads from Oliveira's electoral campaign, go to:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HK4p35wYgXI

For news stories reporting his victory, please see:

Brazilian clown's poll win threatened by illiteracy claim (October 5, 2010). AFP
Brazil clown secures congress seat after literacy test (December 1, 2010). AFP
Send in the clown (October 7, 2010). The Economist

Footnote:

No source that I can find online can tell me whether Oliveira has become the first professional clown to hold legislative duties.

Lunch

2010-12-19T15:44:00.001+11:00

By law, every commercial street in Australia must contain either a fish and chip shop, a laundromat or a milk bar with a sandwich board showing pictures of the ice creams. Streets, like mine, that have all three can apply for a government grant to construct a newsagents next door, which thereafter will support itself, in the main, by peddling lottery tickets. For lunch today, I ordered a vegetarian burger from a Chinese restaurant between the laundromat and the fish and chip shop. I believe the restaurateur must once have seen a hamburger at some distance and then deduced its contents. It had its points, but no person who'd seen a burger at close range could've classed it as one. In place of the bun, it had two chive pancakes with soy sauce. For the patty it substituted a loose shred of cabbage, slivered black mushrooms and bean shoots. Not one to skimp on the essentials, the restaurateur served it with chopsticks and a selection of dipping sauces.

I ate it with the chopsticks while watching Herzog's Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht. Even Herzog's monster film somehow reminds me of Joseph Conrad; more human than human but unafraid of the truth about the world. I watched it on a television projector plugged into tiny, quiet speakers, but the source volume set to maximum. Every time the music swelled the speakers rattled and distorted like Hendrix wailing the seventh sharp nine in Heart of Darkness.

Declaration of principles

2010-12-11T06:57:00.002+11:00

I have it on good authority that the MPAA intend this commercial to discourage movie piracy, rather than, as it appears, to encourage car theft.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HmZm8vNHBSU

One marvels that such advertisements make it past their first test screening, let alone into the forefront of a multimillion dollar crusade against copyright infringement. The average viewer must jump ship at the first premise:

"You wouldn't steal a car."

I would if it belonged to Sony. The first car, I'd steal to drive. The second one, I'd set fire to and photograph burning on a stolen Sony camera, so that later I could send them the pictures of me laughing watching it burn.

Monolith

2010-12-09T07:32:00.000+11:00

I whittled this out of a lump of acrylic paint. To create the lump I layered different-coloured coats of paint on top of each other until the lump became thick enough to whittle.

http://www.sevenextraeyes.org/andy-social/sculpture.jpg

Arrakis

2010-12-07T15:41:00.004+11:00

Sophie kept a boyfriend named Alan - the same way that one might keep a housecat or a gerbil. Alan belonged to that shadowy class of persons who somehow leave no discernable impression in your thoughts. You would've found him listed in the credits as 'fireman #3' or 'guest at party'.

He had a genial temperament; he'd amble out to see you when you arrived and make small talk. He just appeared underwritten. When you looked up from a conversation, you'd find him standing in the background fiddling with something, as if his actor didn't have any lines and needed to full up the time pretending to do something. His presence left so scant an impression that to this day I can remember only two facts about him: he owned a video camera and slept heavily.

Alan pointed his video camera down random city streets and empty staircases. He filmed car yards, corroded fire escapes and parking garages. But, like Thierry Guetta, he had no coherent plan for what he'd ever do with the footage.

From time to time, Alan would turn up in the evening to discover that Sophie had already gone out. He'd hang loose in the living room for a while, before taking a break to chill out while he worked up the energy to kick back for the rest of the evening. Exhausted from the effort, he'd fall asleep on the sofa (why he didn't move to Sophie's room eludes me). Nothing short of an air raid siren would wake him. I could blow my harp in the same room without rousing him.

Returning one evening after midnight, Hilary and I discovered we'd both forgotten our keys. While Hilary hammered on the door, I worked the intercom buzzer. I buzzed it on and off trying to avoid any sort of rhythm, which I reasoned the sleeper might adapt to.

"Bzzzzz b-b-bzzt bzzzzzzzz bzzzzzt bzz bzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzt b-bzzzzzz bzzzt bzzzz bz bzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz bzzzzzzzzzzzzt"

Thus do the Fremen stride the great deserts.

Four flights of stairs down, I could hear Hilary hammering on the door. Inside it must've sounded like they'd detonated the family atomics.

When he answered the intercom at last it took me at least half a minute to notice.

"Bzzzt bzzz Yes? bt bzzzzzzzzzzz Who- bzzzzt this? bzt bzt bzt Can y- bzzzzzzz -rist's sake pl- bzzzzzzt bzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz"

"Oh, Alan?" I said.

Hilary kept battering on the door.

"Oh God," he said, "not this again."

Space fish

2010-12-05T20:09:00.004+11:00

I knitted this space fish together in Adobe Illustrator using Illustrator's punk and bloat functions, which replace the segments between the anchor points with curves:

http://www.sevenextraeyes.org/andy-social/spacefish.jpg

Númenor

2010-12-04T08:44:00.004+11:00

Despite contentions by many aggravated flatmates to the contrary, agreeing to live with someone has always meant agreeing to live with any girlfriend or boyfriend they may acquire down the track. Two millennia before the invention of television, Socrates' flatmates woke up at three in the morning to find some shirtless guy mending his sandals in their vestibule.

When Hilary and I first started going out, I became the House Boyfriend. Her housemate sometimes found me in a towel mending a harmonica in their living room. I paid no rent and never did any housework.

Later, when I moved out with Colin, we swapped and Hilary became our apartment's House Girlfriend. Colin sometimes waited for forty-five minutes to take his shower while she ran through some occult cosmetics lustration in the bathroom. I don't know anything about it except that it involved filling up the sink with water.

When Colin moved to California, Hilary and I moved in together. After we broke up, I kept the apartment and invited Ken to come live with me. For the first time, I found myself on the receiving end of the arrangement.

Between them, Ken and his girlfriend owned one dressing gown (and it, threadbare to the point of obscenity). Until they got around to getting dressed sometime around midday, only one of them could leave their bedroom at a time.

The close quarters also foists a haphazard cognisance of your flatmates' lovemaking upon your awareness (in particular if in its course they should involve the wall that divides their bedroom from yours). I'd never dealt with this before and had assumed I'd react with one (or both) of the usual two responses we make to sexuality: arousal or embarrassment. Instead, I found it cast the condition of my newfound bachelorhood into rather severe relief. When you find yourself designing a fantasy roleplaying system on the computer at three in the morning, while your flatmate has terrific sex next door, it becomes difficult not to wonder whether you might've taken a wrong turn somewhere.

Children's ice cream, Mandrake?

2010-12-02T20:04:00.003+11:00

This started out as a sketch of Sterling Hayden as General Ripper in Dr. Strangelove. I could never get it to look much like Ripper, so I softened it into a face with a more sympathetic expression.

http://www.sevenextraeyes.org/andy-social/face.jpg

Relocation

2010-12-01T23:44:00.004+11:00

I've relocated Arc to a virtual server at,

http://208.91.129.206/

At the moment, the choicest virtual servers go for around $200 a month. For $200, you get a glamorous server-townhouse near the city with its own security force and a cleaning lady who visits twice a week. At the cheaper end of the market, $50 a month will lease the server equivalent of a modest apartment in the suburbs with one parking space and a functional hot water system. The $5 a month I pay (to a provider who spells the word 'experts' in their name with two Xs and a U) leases the equivalent of a cardboard box in a slum ruled by local gangs. Please let me know if you have any trouble getting in.

Moses' trump

2010-11-27T13:42:00.004+11:00

As he nears the land of Canaan, Moses sends ahead scouts to reconnoitre the terrain. He directs them to ascertain both the enemy's strength and the fertility of their land.

To their delight, the land appears fertile,

And they came as far as the valley of Segola, and cut down from there a branch with one bunch of grapes, and they carried it between two of them on a pole; and they brought some pomegranates and some figs...
And they returned from spying out the land after forty days.
And they came to Moses and Aaron and to all the congregation of the children of Israel, to the wilderness of Paran, to Rakim; and they brought back word to them and to all the congregation, and showed them the fruit of the land.¹

The tactical situation appears less propitious. Giants and their offspring infest the land. Fortifications gird the cities.

There we saw giants, the sons of giants, the descendents of giants; and we... [appeared] in their sight like grasshoppers...²

Few field surveys in the history of warfare can have returned such unfavourable results. Little wonder that most of the Israelites lose heart,

And all the children of Israel murmured against Moses and against Aaron; and the whole congregation said to them, Would God we had died in the land of Egypt! Or would God that we had died in this wilderness.
Why has the Lord brought up into this land, to fall by the sword...
And they said to one another, Let us appoint a leader, and let us return to Egypt.
Then Moses and Aaron fell on their faces before all the assembly of the congregation of the children of Israel.
And Joshua the son of Nun, and Caleb the son of Jophaniah... rent their clothes;
And they said to all the congregation of the children of Israel...
If the Lord delights in us, he will bring us into this land and give it to us, a land which flows indeed with milk and honey...
But the whole congregation said to stone them with stones. And the glory of the Lord appeared in the cloud in the tabernacle of the congregation before all the children of Israel.
And the Lord said to Moses, How long will this people provoke me? And how long will they not believe me, for all the signs which I have done among them?
I will smite them with pestilence and destroy them, and I will make of you a nation... greater and mightier than they.³

Through his readiness to carry out mass executions for the crime of murmuring, God shows again his infinite love and mercy. Again it falls to Moses to talk him down,

And Moses said to the Lord, Then the Egyptians shall hear it (for thou didst bring up this people in thy might from among them),⁴

Can fears about how the news might play among the Egyptians stay the hand of a God?

And if thou shalt kill all this people as one man, then the nations who have heard the fame of thee will say,
Because the Lord... [couldn't] bring this people into the land which he swore to them, therefore he has slain them in the wilderness.
And now, let they power, O Lord, be great according as thou hast spoken, saying,
The Lord... longsuffering and of great mercy, and thou forgivest iniquity and transgression, by no means clearing the guilty, but visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children and upon their children's children to the third and forth generation. Pardon the iniquity of this people according to the greatness of thy mercy, and as thou hast forgiven them from Egypt even until now.
And the Lord said to Moses, I have forgiven them according to your word...
And yet all the men who have seen my glory and signs which I did in Egypt and in the wilderness have tempted me, behold now, these ten times; and have not hearkened to my voice;
Surely they shall not see the land which I swore to their fathers, neither shall any one of those who provoked me see it...
(Now the Amalekties and Canaanities dwelt in the mountains.) Tomorrow turn and set out for the wilderness by the way of the Red Sea.
And the Lord spoke to Moses and Aaron, saying,
How long shall this wicked congregation murmur in my presence? I have heard the complaints of the children of Israel which they murmur in my presence.
Say to them, As I live, says the Lord, as you have spoken in my presence, so will I do to you;
Your corpses shall fall in this wilderness... from twenty years old and upward, because you have murmured against me.
You shall not come into the land concering which I swore to make you dwell therin, except Caleb the son of Jophaniah, and Joshua the son of Nun.
But your little ones, who you said would become prey, and your sons who today do not know good and evil, they shall enter into the land, and I will bring them there, and they shall know the land which you have despised.
But as for you, your corpses shall fall in this wilderness.
And your sons shall be shepherds forty years in this wilderness, and shall suffer for your whoredom until your corpses... consumed in the wilderness.
According to the number of the days in which you spied out the land, even forty days, a year for each day, shall you suffer for your iniquities, forty years...
And the men whom Moses sent to spy out the land, who returned and made all the congregation murmur against him by publishing an evil report concerning the land.
These men who published an evil report of the land died by sudden plague before the Lord.⁵

Those men just reported what they saw. One imagines that few scouts ever made that mistake again.

Footnotes:

Numbers 13; 23, 25-26. Quoted without ellipses in comments.
Numbers 13; 33. Quoted without ellipses in comments.
Numbers 14; 2-6, 8, 10-12. Quoted without ellipses in comments.
Numbers 14; 13
Numbers 14; 15-20, 22-23, 24-34, 36-37. Quoted without ellipses in comments.

Arc

2010-11-23T09:16:00.001+11:00

Arc simulates skirmishes between spaceships controlled by different algorithms. The players upload Java bytecode files that implement acceleration and target functions. Each pair of functions then controls a squadron of spaceships as it maneuvers and fires upon another such squadron. Arc tabulates the outcomes of these skirmishes and allocates an Elo rating to each pair of functions for comparison.

Each skirmish in Arc transpires within an arena. The arena defines the limits of the battlefield, the capabilities of the spaceships, the initial size and distribution of the opposing squadrons and the positions and behavior of any obstacles or areas of interest within the battlefield.

Arc spaceships move in two dimensions. To alter their velocity, they may apply a fixed magnitude of acceleration in any direction.

Each spaceship begins with a number of structure points. The arena determines how many. Each spaceship also has a reservoir of charge, which increases over time up to a maximum of ten points. By expending one point of charge, a spaceship may launch a torpedo in any direction, nominating one spaceship as its target. These torpedoes glide at a constant speed relative to the battlefield. The arena determines how fast. A spaceship struck by a torpedo that targets it loses one structure point and the torpedo dematerialises. A spaceship that comes into contact with a torpedo that doesn't target it remains unharmed, but the torpedo still dematerialises if a friendly ship launched it. A spaceship that loses its last structure point or stumbles into an obstacle explodes in a shower of harmless sparks.

For the website, go to:

http://www.sevenextraeyes.org/arc/

Meat ark

2010-11-13T00:48:00.015+11:00

The masculine squalor of a man's first share-house often owes as much to his housemates' incompetence at housework as to their disdain for it. Some may know how to replace fuse wire or unblock a toilet, but few men of eighteen have any tangible notion of how to clean a grill trap or defrost a refrigerator. When Dirk moved out in the seventies, many young men couldn't even cook.

Dirk shared a house with several other young men. Beginning somewhere in the twentieth century at their arrival, conditions in the house at once began to deteriorate backwards through the aeons of human history. After a month, they'd plummeted to a pre-industrial level. By the end of winter, the housemates feared certain rooms of the house and could no longer make fire.

One of them had inherited a multitude of pots from his grandmother. Leftovers that decayed beyond a certain point they would throw out, in one piece, with the containing pot. The painlessness of this solution impressed the housemates. In their minds it planted the seed that would blossom into the Meat Ark.

The household purchased meat in prodigious quantities and stored it in a deep freezer in the basement. When the freezer's motor seized and the meat started to rot, they just stopped using the basement. By the height of summer, the stench infused the house. Roused into action at last, one of them liberated a high-temperature sealant sprayer from his work. Wearing a protective suit, he cocooned the freezer inside a glistening prism of silicone.

When archaeologists excavate our civilization's remains in a thousand years, they will find Dirk's Meat Ark. What a puzzle it will pose for some grad student. One suspects that even in the thirty-first century, supervisors willing to accept "youthful stupidity" as an archaeological explanation will remain rare.

Poster for Colin

2010-11-07T08:48:00.002+11:00

Colin:

Poster for Poor pluto

2010-10-30T05:06:00.002+11:00

Poor pluto:

Parties

2010-10-28T07:16:00.031+11:00

The clock showed three when the speeding person made his move. He'd stalked me since two, prowling around the edge of the conversation, waiting to detach me from the herd. The need to verbalise his jumbled thoughts to some listener beat like a fever behind his eyes.

I knew a carnivore when I saw one, but the the room's shadows made him almost invisible. I think the Goths who decorated the place must've concocted them on purpose. Draped in costume-shop gloom for the occasion, their apartment looked like a Tim Burton exhibit realised in eight dollars of black and purple crepe paper. When I looked away for a twinkling moment, he pounced out of the shadows.

Forty five seconds later I knew that,

his starch allergy had improved since he started eating organic foods,
that a Myers-Briggs personality questionnaire had categorised him as a Feeling Judging Sensing person, but that he considered himself a Thinking Intuiting Perceiving person instead,
that he deserved to get a new desktop at work and would talk to Robin about it on Monday, and,
that a goldfish, Logan, whom he'd kept as an adolescent, had taught him a lot about responsibility and real respect for other living creatures.

Pinned in place by the speeding person at three in the morning, listening to them play that Cure song about the love cats for the fifteenth time I decided to see whether, next time she wanted to stay late, I might not just drive home by myself and get her to telephone when she needed me to pick her up.

At the next party, I left at midnight - or, to speak in more salient terms, half an hour after they started taking pills. She stayed behind. When I phoned back four hours later, a man I'd never met answered the phone. I asked if I could speak to her. He said he didn't mind and then stayed on the line.

"Quick!" someone cried in the background, "Chad has the phone again."

A few moments later I heard them wrenching the handset away from him. A friend of mine came on the line, out of breath, and apologised about Chad. He went to find her, but as soon as he left Chad came back on. I'd become prey again.

"Can I play you Mary Had a Little Lamb on the phone numbers?" he said.

"Ah," I said, "Could that disconnect th-"

"Beep bloooooop bleeeeeep beep bloooooop beep bloooooo-"

"Ok," I said, "I-"

"Hang on," he said, "I got it wrong."

"Look," I said, "it doesn't mat-"

"Beeeeeeeep blooooop bleeeeep bleeep blooooo-"

"Wait," he said.

"Hold up!" I said, "It jus-"

"Beep bloop bleep beep bloop beep beep bloop bloop bloop blooop bleep blee-"

"One sec," he said.

I had about a second to plead with him.

"Stop!" I said, "Why don't-"

"Beep bloop bee-"

"Wait," he said.

"Beep bloop bleep beep bloop beep beep bloop bloop bloop bleep beep beep bloop bee-"

"I know I can do it," he said.

"Stop! Wait!" I pled.

"Beeeep blooooooop bleeeep beeep bloooop beeeeeeep beeeeep beeeeeep beee-"

"Wait," he said, "just one more try."

"Stop this! Stop this! Stop this!" I chanted.

"Beep bloop bleep beep bloop beep beep bloop bloop bloop bleep beep beep beep bloop bleep beep bloop beep beep bloop bloop beep bloop bleep"

I think he'd done it.

"Perfect!" I said, "If I could just talk to-"

"Now," he said, "let's play a duet."

Poster for Poodles

2010-10-20T11:18:00.000+11:00

Poodles:

Ethnographic exercise

2010-10-17T19:29:00.005+11:00

The Brotherhood of Trustees owes its present influence to an archaic custom barring the aristocracy from direct involvement in commerce. The custom holds that commerce can never furnish the form of unassailable security it sees as the precondition for noble disinterestedness. Moreover, by their nature, commercial transactions would often compel the nobleman to deal with commoners as equals. The noble must regard such concourse as demeaning, both to himself in person and to the institution of nobility as a whole¹.

Since it draws its legislators from the noble class, the state expects its nobles, even when they operate through agents, to remain free from any economic attachments that could affect their judgment as lawmakers. Instead, tradition requires the aristocrat to base his wealth upon a secure foundation unlikely to feel the effect of changes in the nation's laws or shifts in her citizens' activities. He must feel as secure in his wealth as he does in his social superiority. Only then, says the tradition, will he have complete freedom to act in defence of the public's honour.

In earlier ages, the nobility derived their income from large country estates, often leasing portions of them to commoners. As the nobility moved to the city and the importance of the traditional estate receded, it needed a way to invest its wealth in business concerns without compromising its aloofness from direct commerce or exposing itself to too much risk. The doctrine arose that the nobleman should remain blind to the nature of his investments and concern himself instead only with selecting an agent of the best possible character.

The Brotherhood of Trustees began as a simple trade guild for such agents. Its code of professional ethics, though strict, ensued from the simple practical need to win the nobility's confidence. But as the brotherhood grew rich, it became presumptive. By stages, that code transformed from a series of practical injunctions into a baroque and often unintelligible system of religion worshiping the notion of contract through the person of the sovereign.

Although audited at intervals by the Crown, it operates from day-to-day without oversight.

Footnote:

Worse, depending on his commercial fortunes, he may even need to abase himself before commoners, laying his own dignity to waste and thus marring the dignity of the state.

Tour scenic Cesta Punta

2010-10-11T06:45:00.002+11:00

I thought I'd draw old-timey travel posters to portray some of the blog posts as various holiday spots.

Tour scenic Cesta Punta:

Allergies

2010-10-10T04:07:00.000+11:00

My puppy seems allergic to something in the garden. After roaming around in it, he scratches and rubs his face with his forepaws. I've pulled out what I thought the most probable culprits, such as Wandering Jew, but something out there still makes him itch. Can anyone suggest what else might cause it? Together with several plants I can't identify, the garden contains: thyme, dill, basil, cumin, aniseed, liquorice, borage, rosemary, chervil, chamomile, wormwood, wormseed, marjoram, evening primrose, caraway, sage, pineapple sage, bog sage, catnip, tansy, woad, motherwort, mugwort, soapwort, pearlwort, garlic, laurel, mint, Corsican mint, apple mint, Korean mint, spearmint, peppermint, lavender, hyssop, creeping fig, smyrnium, violets, parsley, brahmi, fenugreek, strawberries, coriander, pennyroyal, laksa leaf, pegagan, elm trees, sorrel, daisies, mustard, alyssum, oregano, feverfew, perilla, tarragon, carrots, tulsi, meadowsweet, chives, fennel, valerian, jojoba, rue, bee balm, verbena, lovage, poppies, onions, raspberries, savoury, skullcap, yarrow, jasmine, salad burnet, a maidenhair fern and an expiring cardamom plant.

Don't Remember Day

2010-10-08T03:09:00.001+11:00

Brought to you by

The Provisional Government

Cesta punta

2010-10-06T03:20:00.009+11:00

After cooking and eating his shoe in Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe, Herzog explains that he ranks a lack of adequate images as one of the gravest threats to civilisation. He puts it on par with overpopulation and ecological devastation.

For the man who fixes his focus well into the future, it cuts to the marrow of his fear that human progress in his society may've ground to a standstill. Without adequate images to knit its dreams from, can his society dream dreams of significance? Or will it spend its time perfecting the Slurpee and finding Australia's Next Top Model, as its citizens grow more and more isolated from each another?

But to his more myopic brother, it must sound about as probable as our dying out from an overreliance on serif typefaces.

Needless to say, cinema has given us some splendid images. We love watching Sonny strutting up and down in front of that bank in Dog Day Afternoon or M. Emmet Walsh gleaming in the moonlight in Blood Simple. We love Walter Sobchak holding out the homework in a zip lock bag. We love Fitzcarraldo playing his gramophone on the roof of his riverboat or Aguirre scuttling sideways along the shoreline. But by 2010, our movie industry has come to the point of investing 200 million dollars in a sequel to the movie Tron¹.

According to Wikipedia, after its release in 1982 the Tron franchise produced eleven different video games, a novelisation and a comic book, before finding its final expression in the electroluminescent bodysuit of Jay Maynard².

Some years ago, a Trivial Pursuit question brought to my attention the futuristic gladiatorial sport of Jai-Alai - by all appearances the inspiration for Tron's lethal disc game. Its players use arched scoops tied to one forearm to throw and catch a hard ball on a long squash court. The ball can reach speeds of up to three hundred kilometres an hour. It may ricochet off of several surfaces before the receiving player tries to catch it. From time to time, the ball kills one of the players. Ernest Hemingway witnessed a near fatality in Havana,

"In my life I have seen many people with life threatening injuries, but the accident which Ibarlucea suffered exposed before my eyes an event of courage and serenity which I could never have dreamed. All of a sudden, Guillermo... caught and threw the ball in an awkward posture and had the bad luck of hitting Ibarlucea in the head. The ball... sounded different, dry, cold, like the slam of a door. But Ibarlucea did not fall. What fortitude! It seemed impossible that he could remain on his feet. Red carnations began to spread on his white shirt... The other pelotaris and the judges ran up to him and led him to the infirmary... They operated on him two times and science miraculously returned him to life."³

This photograph, which comes from the weblog Plumb Lines⁴, shows a modern player ready to serve,

http://www.sevenextraeyes.org/andy-social/cesta1.jpg

Here we see the gladiators saluting with their claw scoops⁵,

http://www.sevenextraeyes.org/andy-social/cesta2.jpg

These show a cover of the Mexican Jai-Alai magazine A Chula and an old program booklet for Melbourne Jai-Alai in Melbourne, Florida⁶,

http://www.sevenextraeyes.org/andy-social/cesta3.jpg

http://www.sevenextraeyes.org/andy-social/cesta4.jpg

Footnotes:

Slated for release in December 2010. Disney promotional site at http://disney.go.com/tron/
aka "Tron guy". For the Wikipedia article, go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jay_Maynard
Quoted in The History of Basque Pelota in the Americas, Carmelo Urza, University of Nevada, Reno. Retrieved from http://www2.library.unr.edu/journals/10423834/1995/p001.pdf
At http://plumblines.wordpress.com/
From Tampa Bay Online. Caption begins, "After an illustrious 45-year history, Jai- Alai players lineup to salute their fans on the last night of Jai- Alai at the fronton in Tampa."
From http://armenta316.tripod.com/arch.htm

Tastes or cravings

2010-09-15T17:05:00.001+10:00

Brought to you by

The Provisional Government

Read your ticket

2010-09-12T02:25:00.003+10:00

For Sophie, physical necessity, by itself, didn't fix the moment when the future must arrive. Time marched rubato, stretching and bending to the individual rhythms of the players. As long as you stuck to the spirit of the arrangement, Time would turn a blind eye to a few extra minutes here or there.

To those with a pragmatic turn of mind, the view must've seemed an unmitigated failure. You found Sophie forever running late, out of petrol and waiting on her next paycheque to make the phone work again. Repossession agents chivvied her in flocks while friends she'd failed to meet crammed her answering machine with irate messages.

Yet, it dispossessed these predicaments (and many others) of their ability to engender distress. Once you believed a person's will could distort time itself, you always had time for a cup of coffee.

Sophie did recognise that parking restrictions, on the other hand, permitted no such flexibility. However, she could always convince herself that she'd have enough time to get in, do whatever she needed to do and get out again before any traffic warden ticketed her car. Picture the traffic wardens patrolling in slow-motion, mired in their belief in a rigid time, while Sophie alights from her car, folds the space to the post office and uses her Guildsman's badge to bypass the queue.

When she returned ninety minutes later, with a coffee, to find a ticket on the windshield, she would move it to another car - if possible, a fancy one. She believed (on faith rather than evidence) that most people would just pay any ticket they found on their car without reading it.

At home, Sophie parked in an L-shaped parking area behind her apartment building. The driveway ran down the side of the building next to the fence before making a remorseless hairpin turn into the parking area. Sophie parked on an otherwise disfavoured rise near one corner. Her car required push starting. Any two people can push start a car, but doing it by yourself requires a certain will to slapstick. Every morning, Sophie pushed her car down the slant, sprinted around to leap into the driver's seat and tried to start it before it coasted into the fence. As soon as the ignition caught, she'd execute a handbrake turn around the hairpin, slinging an arc of gravel up against the fence. With that, she hurtled down the driveway on to Hotham Road, off to occupy a loading zone at the university.

Headache

2010-09-05T07:35:00.000+10:00

Brought to you by

The Provisional Government

Men without women

2010-09-03T09:23:00.002+10:00

A friend of David's owned only one glass. In the mornings he would drink milk with it. In the evenings he would drink beer with it. He held that the beer washed out the milk and then, in turn, the milk washed out the beer, so that he never needed to wash the glass. In the end he got quite sick.

Air hog

2010-08-31T04:21:00.003+10:00

Brought to you by

The Provisional Government

Rural man

2010-08-28T22:44:00.011+10:00

Our electoral system has granted us a chance to see the rural man with his plumage outstretched¹. If we'd sought his canefield notions by direct methods, rural man would've come with his guard up. His keen rural nose would've warned him that something smelled amiss. An instinctual wariness of the city folk would've confounded his eagerness to foist his granddaddy's wisdom upon them. By the time we coaxed him to state his views, he would've bored them full of equivocations and other boltholes for escape, lest the devious city folk try to trap him in them. But instead, our electoral system has managed to deliver him to us with his pride in his backwoods convictions unabashed. I indulge in a few samples:

"Mr Katter reckoned yesterday he would 'walk to Bourke backwards' if 'the poof population of North Queensland...[equals]...any more than 0.001 per cent'.
'Mind you,' he said, 'if the percentage...[equals]...what they say it...[does]...in the rest of Australia, then I think I'll take to walking everywhere backwards.'"

Sydney Morning Herald

^2,3

comments

"Ethnic community leaders say the use by the National Party MP for the Federal seat of Kennedy, Mr Bob Katter, of the racist term "slanty-eyed ideologues" could ruin the Coalition's electoral chances on March 2."
(Helen Pitt, Sack Katter, Urge Ethnic Leaders (February 15, 1996). Sydney Morning Herald.⁴)

Katter Throws Crocs Into Climate Debate (August 12, 2009, ABC News Online)

"Independent MP Bob Katter has wheeled a barrow full of bananas into Parliament House as a way of highlighting the threat imports pose to the local industry...
Mr Katter's staff, dressed as bananas, danced and howled in the background"
(Katter Pulls Banana Stunt in Canberra (September 17, 2009). Sydney Morning Herald⁵.

Nats try to lure rednecks (September 24, 1999, Illawarra Mercury)

Footnotes:

Can democracy forgive my childish misgivings? I see now how much better it knew my desires than I did. On behalf of all Australians who delight in the mockery of country people, I extend thanks to our electoral system for the sudden eminence of Bob Katter.
Retrieved August 28, 2010 from
newsstore.smh.com.au
Repeated in Jo Chandler, Katter Country (August 28, 2010). The Age.
Retrieved August 28, 2010 from
newsstore.smh.com.au
Retrieved August 28, 2010 from
news.smh.com.au

Provisional government

2010-08-23T20:49:00.004+10:00

Brought to you by

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Reply to Peter

2010-08-21T09:40:00.013+10:00

Most of us observe in history a persistent, if unsteady, trend towards enlightenment. It delights us to contemplate the extent to which human freedom has expanded since, for instance, the seventeenth century, or the extent to which it had by then already expanded since the seventh. But I can't see that democracies have had any more hand in spreading that enlightenment than other sorts of governments. If grounds exist to think that systems like ours produce abominable regimes less often than the alternatives, I'd love to hear them. For my part, I just see various regimes, some admirable, others abhorrent and many in-between, scattered between the different forms of government.

The Nazi party came to power through a popular election; Stalin's regime through maneuverers within the executive. Would it have mattered if it'd happened the other way around? Would the former somehow have perpetrated even greater abominations or the latter lesser ones? To take a current example, could the foreign policy of the United States somehow become even more barbaric if, for instance, some ancestral dynasty ruled it as a kingdom?

One sometimes hears that our system supplies the twin benefits of including us in the governance of our nation and compelling our leaders to respond to our wishes¹. In my own case, for instance, I find that little could stray farther from the truth. Instead the process amounts to a triennial alienation ritual through which the electoral commission reacquaints me with the knowledge that,

No party for whose candidate I've voted has ever formed government

No party that even entertains the hope of installing members in either house represents my views on basic questions².

Footnotes:

A misapprehension that one presumes they'd resent (just as the country magistrate would resent it if his townsfolk thought he might handover a prisoner to them whenever a majority of them got into the mood for a lynching).

1. Like many, I believe that the foreign policy of the USA has become so heinous that as a nation we should oppose the USA irrespective of the consequences for Australia
2. If Australia must choose between doing the right thing and its survival then we should do the right thing and die with honour.
I concede that in our current climate opinions like this one qualify as contentious. More than half the friends to whom I've confided it disagree, but I've never received the impression that they find the idea outrageous. Yet for all the political endorsement it receives, I might as well have as my representatives a parliament of owls.

Cover of "The Warriors of Batak"

2010-08-17T09:14:00.012+10:00

Somewhere in the last century, the boilerplate book cover for fantasy roleplaying products became a picture of two magical warrior women in cleavage-armour confronting each other from the backs of dragons¹.

Although one applauds Task Force Games' decision to depart from this formula in The Warriors of Batak, one can't help but wonder about the process that chose this:

http://www.sevenextraeyes.org/andy-social/batak.jpg

Footnote:

Miniatures wargames caught a blast of the same wind, although they favoured a more crowded-looking, homoerotic version of the same scene.
Where the fantasy game or magazine had already used the dragon riders on a recent cover, the formula permitted five variations:
- Cleavage-sorceress steps onto balcony with a ball of fire over her hands,
- Cleavage-warrior holds a spear in front of her companions,
- Man sits in room of astrological apparatus,
- Group of friends consult map in a tavern
- Man in rich armour fights ogre in the snow.

Night clubber

2010-08-14T08:28:00.004+10:00

I revere Vincent Gallo's film Buffalo 66 as a work of genius. From the outset, the film seizes our attention through its humour and stunning photography. Buffalo looks like Orwell's bright cold day in April when the clocks struck thirteen. Gallo's flurrying delivery leaves us in hysterics.

At first, we despise his protagonist. After heckling her away from the payphone, he mooches phone change from the tap dancer and then sneers at her in return.

"Don't you say thanks?"

"What?"

"Don't you say, 'thank you'?"

"What?"

In the toilets, he all but beats a man in a tantrum of homophobia.

At best, we see him as a rodent trying to swagger like the eagle.

And then, somewhere between the train wreck of his family and his friend Goon who sent the raisins, we start to feel sorry for him. By the time we finish cackling at the photo-booth snapshots of the couple "spanning time together" and the goal kicker's "Sexxotic dancers", we discover that we've come to care about him. We even like him. As he treads the last footsteps of his plan for vengeance, we pray that he'll turn back.

How did we come to care about Billy Brown?

In 2003, news reached me that Gallo's newest film would debut at the Melbourne Underground Film Festival. I mustered a posse to see it.

Before the screening, the film's co-writer and co-director, Dale Reeves, welcomed us to the theatre, apologising that Gallo couldn't make it tonight. Dale had a bodybuilder's body but pudgy cheeks and a weighty head that he waxed bare. Together, it generated the impression of a giant baby forced into a suit. Dale stammered through a swift speech, relating how for years, he'd dreamed of making this film. At last, after years of striving, his dream had become reality. As we applauded, he beamed at us in thanks and tears welled in his eyes. It seemed a moment of perfect joy.

Dale moved to the back of the cinema near the door. We sat in the backmost row over to one side of him. Most of the other seats remained tenantless. Leaving out people connected to the film or festival, it appeared that less than a dozen patrons had come to see it.

In the end, Vincent Gallo's 2003 film The Brown Bunny suffered from its premature release. We, however, had gone to see Vincenzo Gallo's Nightclubber, which suffered from a total lack of any merit.

It resembled nothing so much as a teenaged boy's attempt at self-aggrandisement. It starred Dale Reeves himself (at that moment standing behind and to the right of us) in the role of 'NC', following NC's quest to prove to the wincing viewer what a badass he'd become.

The majority of the dialogue sounded like that same teenager browbeaten by a relative into describing his day at school. The remainder they had derived from a farrago of 80s action movies and rock albums, divested of any lingering humour and then subjected to several rounds of machine translation.

Though I now find it amusing to recollect, at the time it produced in us an amalgam of embarrassment and loathing akin to seeing a man soil himself in public. We felt an overpowering need to get away from it, but we could only gain the exit by trampling through a man's dreams.

When, at the Last Judgement, the matter of my atheism comes before the celestial court, my attorney (if he knows his stuff) will cite my endurance on this occasion as evidence of my good character. He will summon witnesses present on that evening to testify that, with my comrades, I held to my seat for a full thirty minutes.

However, under cross-examination, I fear that the suave prosecutor may force me to admit that this constituted less than a third of the film's full length. Or that ("more damning still," I can hear him chuckling to the jury) for the last ten of those minutes, rather than hanging on out of any laudable sympathy, we simply lacked the nerve to shuffle out of the theatre two feet in front of the man's nose.

Tony

2010-08-09T02:33:00.007+10:00

Throughout history (save perhaps during some momentary outbreaks of nationalism) reflective men and women have seen their societies as wasteful, self-destructive, cruel, superficial and rapacious. The notion that one lives in a democracy (whether true or illusory) now serves to infuse these perennial reflections with a sense of alienation by implying that the majority of one's fellows want it that way.

Recent polls find the Australian public conniving to place Tony Abbot in charge of the country¹. If in the next two weeks no chimera materialises to frighten them back in the opposite direction, they may succeed at it.

Suppose that instead of our current system we endured under some sort of corrupt (and unelected) noblesse who plotted the same thing. We would still resent them. We would see their Abbot as proof of their contempt for us. But we, together, would resent them.

By making that same man the confection of a process it describes as democratic, our system alienates us from the majority of our countrymen and countrywomen by alleging the he embodies their ideals.

Footnote:

Abbott leads Gillard in latest poll (July 31, 2010). The Age, Retrieved August 8, 2010 from
http://news.theage.com.au/breaking-news-national/abbott-leads-gillard-in-latest-poll-20100731-1102s.html

Government trails coalition in latest poll (August 7, 2010). Business Spectator, Retrieved August 8, 2010 from
http://www.businessspectator.com.au/bs.nsf/Article/Labor-trails-coalition-in-latest-poll-83L73?OpenDocument&src=tnb

Poor Pluto

2010-08-02T21:30:00.004+10:00

The educational films they showed us in middle school seemed all at least twenty-years old. On flickering projector film, scientists in brown suits took us on a tour of the body's respiratory system while sanitised hipsters with pompadours showed us how to resist peer pressure. Crew-cutted schoolboys discovered the power of lunchroom manners while other sons and daughters of white hegemony learned how quiet helps at school. Deep-voiced fabulists sold us a version of the American legislative process with no pharmaceutical or energy lobbyists. Other narrators, whose measured delivery somehow conveyed the vastness of space, described the then nine planets of the solar system as the viewpoint swept out towards poor Pluto (of late expelled from the League of Planets for conduct unbefitting a solar planet).

In a grainy National Geographic film from the fifties we saw Bushmen of the Kalahari Desert hunt an elephant. To those of us inclined to sentimentalise the elephant, it seemed villainous. Whatever their actual character, elephants prevailed in our jejune sympathies as gentle creatures, even altruistic ones. Watching them hunt this uncomprehending behemoth felt like seeing them hunt Lennie down through the last pages of Of Mice and Men.

For most of the film, they tracked the elephant. For days they circled around, changing direction at each stripped tree, pile of dung or elephantine footprint. No doubt, in reality, tracking a ten-tonne creature over a featureless plain proves harder than it sounds, but it did put a note of suspicion into one's mind. Time after time, we watched them wake, fill skins with water and spend the day reading the tracks, only to retire at sundown empty-handed. As time stretched on, it seemed less and less probable that they'd find the elephant.

And then, with no warning, it appeared in the shade of a solitary tree. The Bushmen, who before had seemed such masters of their environment, now looked tiny and defenceless; the elephant immense and unconquerable. No honest pundit would've given them much chance. Three nude men with sharpened sticks confronted an African bull elephant twice the size of any we'd seen in zoos.

Their attack, when it came, took some time even to get its attention.

Instead of fanning out, the Bushmen ranked up together to hurl their tiny spears in volleys. Their first three spears just rebounded off the elephant. The second volley managed to embed one into the rind of its hide for a few moments. The elephant looked up, saw them and went back to eating its tree. The spear fell out.

By the time they ran out of spears several volleys later, they had succeeded in annoying the elephant.

After several death-defying sorties to reclaim the spent spears (through which the elephant neither charged nor retreated), the Bushmen renewed their attack. It'd become patent that they would never succeed in administering any serious injury. It just remained for us to see if the elephant would trample one of them.

Then, as a new volley of spears glanced the elephant, the film jumped and it lay stone-dead on the ground. We watched them carve the carcass and carry bundles of meat back to their village.

Even as children we realised the film crew must've stopped filming and shot our elephant. But then, what had we seen the Bushmen doing? As soon as you saw them facing down the elephant, you knew this could never work. Not against an elephant half its size. Not if they'd brought twice as many hunters. Their village can't have included elephants among its hunting targets. So how had three huntsmen with tiny javelins wound up leading a film crew across the savannah in search of one?

Could they've found themselves caught in a lie?

No doubt when they arrived in the village, National Geographic's team had said that they'd come to find out what sorts of things people in this village did. It doesn't seem too hard to imagine that some young man might've stepped up and announced that they hunted elephants.

"We'd love to see that!" said the anthropologists.

And perhaps before they knew it, they found themselves out on the plains trying to pick a fight with the savannah equivalent of a tiger tank.

League of Twelve Nations (map)

2010-07-24T03:28:00.001+10:00

This shows the League of Twelve Nations on Vinland-7:

http://www.sevenextraeyes.org/andy-social/leagueoftwelvenations.png

Mojave (map)

2010-07-23T03:17:00.001+10:00

This shows the suburbs and major thoroughfares of Mojave, California on Vinland-7:

http://www.sevenextraeyes.org/andy-social/mojave.png

Vinland-7, 1946

2010-07-21T19:28:00.008+10:00

1050: Fifty years after Leif Ericsson's discovery of North America, Norse colonists build a permanent settlement on the island of Newfoundland.

c. 1060: Exploring the mainland to their west, Norse explorers introduce European diseases into the Americas. By 1200, the native population has fallen from eighteen million to less than four million.

1082: Thorgil Ulfsson explores the North American coastline from Newfoundland to Delaware.

1133: Egill Haengsson founds the city of New Oslo in the region of Connecticut. In 1155, his nephew, Skapti Thorvaldsson, founds the city of Skaptibyggð in the region of Maryland.

c. 1500: European conquest of the New World proceeds at a slower pace. Instead of societies soon decimated by disease, Europe discovers populous native cultures with iron tools and weapons.
The slower pace of conquest, in turn, leads to increased cultural exchange between Europe and Native America. Intermarriage between prominent European Americans and the Native American oligarchies becomes an important tool of diplomacy.
American Christianity adapts to local customs, evangelising in native languages and often building its churches on the sites of former native worship. Elements of native religions enter into American Christianity.

1775: The Norse state of Vinland now comprises the Northeastern region of the United States from Maine to Delaware, Maryland and Pennsylvania as well as the Canadian regions of Newfoundland, Labrador, Québec and eastern Ontario. England hold the territory to their west, from Ontario to Saskatchewan in the North and Virginia to Louisiana in the South. Spain hold most of South and Central America as far north as Honduras. The remainder of North America including Mexico, California and Texas remains under native control.

1775: A confederation of British colonies comprising Indiana, the Carolinas, Kentucky, Ohio, Michigan, Virginia, West Virginia, Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama, Florida and Illinois rebel against British rule, beginning the American Revolutionary War. On July 4, 1776, they declare independence as the Federated States of America (FSA).

~1775: A nuclear explosion with a yield of at least forty kilotons takes place in Antarctica. Infinity's Technical Analysis division believe Centrum responsible.

1823: Retaliating against an attack on an American merchantman, the Federated States Navy bombards the town of Quallah Battoo in Sumatra.

1851: A four-year war between the FSA and a league of Native American nations concludes with the Treaty of Essa-queta, which cedes California, Texas and New Mexico to the FSA.

1852: Tache becomes the first incorporated city in the FSA state of California. It serves as a temporary capital for the state until the legislature moves to Chemehuevi in 1855.

1854: After a clash over tariffs between the FSA and local townspeople, the F.S. Navy sloop Cyane bombards the town of San Juan del Norte, Nicaragua.

1859: Fifty-thousand F.S. settlers receive homesteads in the new state of California under the Federation Homestead Act.

1860: Vinland begins the world's first commercial exploitation of petroleum. A well in the province of Mitrland, Vinland produces two-thousand barrels a year.

1863: F.S. entrepreneur Christopher Peacock contracts to build a Chilean railroad between Santiago and Valparaiso, but when the Chilean government advance him $400,000 to begin, he absconds with the money.

1865: French archaeologist Jasper Faille discovers four adult Neanderthal skeletons in a cave on the South Sandwich Islands that differ to a considerable extent from previous finds. Faille dates them to the Middle Palaeolithic period of 50,000 BC. Two-years later, the scientific community mourns when a museum fire in Paris destroys all four specimens.

1868: A cholera pandemic that began in 1866 comes to an unexplained end. From January to September, 99.8% of all suffers die, sometimes advancing from their initial infection to death in less than a fortnight, but after September, no new cases appear.

1869: Riots against Chinese coolies erupt on the streets of Ohlone, California.

1870: The first transcontinental railroad through the FSA links Virginia Beach in Virginia to the city of Mojave in California (counterpart to Homeline's Los Angeles).

1872: The Vinland ferryboat S. S. Leifr Eiríksson explodes, killing all aboard. Vinland adopts rigorous steamboat maintenance and design codes.

1874: The Orphrey Railroad links the cities of Ohlone and Mojave in California.

1876: An outburst of typhoid fever in Vinland kills five-thousand before disappearing almost overnight. Within a span of days, all known suffers either die or make complete recoveries and no new cases occur.

1879: FSA President Samuel Tilden signs the Chinese Exclusion Act limiting immigration of Chinese labourers to the FSA.

1890: By 1890, California has become the largest oil producer in the Federated States. Oil wells dominate the Mojave Basin and Kern County west of the Antelope Valley. The trading floor of the Mojave Oil Exchange covers almost a hectare.

1895: Mobster "Diamond Jim" Colosimo immigrates to Chicago. He dresses in flashy white suits with diamond pins and rings. By 1910, he owns a share in more than two-hundred brothels and gambling dens in the FSA.

1896: Oil prospectors drill through piers off the shore of Summerland, California, constructing the world's first offshore oil wells.

1901: A reputable study into the efficacy of Old Professor Hostetter's Stomach Sarsaparilla, which contains forty percent alcohol, flabbergasts FSA's medical establishment when it finds the nostrum effective against dysentery, dyspepsia, colic and bilious complaints. Sales skyrocket.

1903: Anthracite coal miners begin a six-month strike that cripples the Federated States. Dexter Chamberlain of the Federated Iron & Coal Company replies that, "The rights and interest of the labouring man will not find protection under the auspices of labour agitators, but only under the aegis of the Christian men to whom God in His infinite wisdom has given the control of the property interests of this country".

1905: Universal Studios, MGM and Warner Brothers all purchase land in Hollywood on the outskirts of Mojave.

1906: An earthquake and the ensuing fires destroy two-thirds of the city of Ohlone, California, leaving a quarter million Californians homeless.

1907: Clement Wheelwright founds the Asiatic Debarment Coalition in Konomihu, California, which seeks to ban Japanese immigration to the FSA.

1909: The Industrial Workers of the World begin the publication of two newspapers: the English-language Industrialist published out of Ahwahnechee, California in the FSA and the Vinlandic-language Waulk published out of Liripipe, Meginland in Vinland.

1910: Roald Amundsen's South Pole Expedition ends in disaster. Going off course near the Axel Heiberg Glacier, the crew perishes in December from hunger and exhaustion.

1911: William Mulholland completes the Mojave Aqueduct connecting Mojave in southern California to creeks of the Oowekeno mountain range in the north.

1912: The Industrial Workers of the World add a Finnish-language newspaper, Tie Vapauteen, to their publications.

1913: The Lincoln Highway links Ohlone, California to Plymouth, North Carolina.

1914: Shipping millionaire Cornell Burroughs builds his mansion in Hollywood, Mojave in the shape of an Iroquois longhouse, starting a fad that lasts until WWII.

1915: The Californian city of Kumeyaay hosts the Panama-California World's Fair. Kumeyaay Zoo, constructed for the event, remains the largest zoo in California to the present day.

1916: The FSA invades the nation of Quisqueya in the Antilles archipelago to protect routes through the Caribbean Sea and Atlantic Ocean to the Panama Canal.

1917: The Mescalero Confederation nationalizes its oilfields.

1918: Annual lynchings in North America fall to an all-time low of 31.

January, 1919: The states of the FSA ratify the Eighteenth Amendment to the Federated States Constitution, prohibiting the manufacture, sale and transportation of 'intoxicating liquors' within the FSA. The ratification, which requires three-quarters of the thirty-five states, completes on the sixteenth of January, with North Dakota and Nebraska the only states against the amendment.

February, 1919: "Diamond Jim" Colosimo opens a brothel named 'The Four Deuces' at 2222 South Wabash in Chicago with his nephew Johnny Torrio. Torrio brings in a young lieutenant named Al Capone to work as its bartender, introducing him to Chicago. When an unknown party murders Colosimo a year later, first Torrio and then Capone gains control of his gang - later known as the 'Chicago Outfit'. Between 1925 and 1930, the Federated States Treasury estimates that Capone rakes in half a billion dollars in illegal income (equal to about six billion GURPS dollars).

September, 1919: In the case Schenck v. Federated States, the Supreme Court of the FSA rules that clauses of the Espionage Act that restrict citizens' freedom to discourage participation in the war effort during wartime violate the right to free speech guaranteed under the First Amendment.

November, 1919: Airmail service begins between Chicago, Illinois and Skapti, New Finnmark. By the end of the year, flight time falls to ten hours.

February, 1920: Mafioso Albert Anastasia (born Umberto Anastasio) emigrates from Calabria, Italy to Virginia, FSA. He soon rises to a position of prominence in the International Longshoremen's Association.

September, 1920: Marcus Garvey opens the first international convention of the Universal Negro Improvement Association at Liberty Hall in Red Bluff, California. Twenty-five thousand delegates attend.

1921: Senator Warren Gamaliel Harding defeats Iowa Governor Thaddeus Drake to become President of the FSA. After Harding's death from an aneurism in 1923, Vice President Montgomery Glover becomes President of the FSA.

January, 1922: The Mojave Ambassador Hotel opens at 532 Oak St. in South Sowee. It has six-hundred rooms and occupies twenty-five acres.

November, 1922: The Shrine Auditorium, future venue of the Academy Awards, opens in Mojave. It features domed cupolas overlaid with tan and pink stones in a Hopi Indian basket-weave pattern.

1923: FSA president Warren Harding fulfils an electoral promise to end the occupation of Quisqueya. In 1925, Quisqueya hold their first elections.

January, 1924: The state of Georgia convicts Albert Anastasia for the homicide of a fellow longshoreman. They incarcerate him in the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary, where he meets Jimmy "The Shiv" Destefano.

August, 1924: Mojave begins an ambitious infrastructure project to remodel the financial district around Pioneer Avenue in South Naahleeka as a grid of identical blocks. Delayed by the attack on Pearl Harbour in 1942, the project completes in November of 1945.

June, 1925: Vinlandic prizefighter Sigurd Kyrre defeats American Jack Dempsey in Oregon, becoming World Heavyweight Champion. By the end of the fight, Kyrre cannot see because of his own blood.

September, 1925: In the case Carroll v. Federated States, the Supreme Court of the Federated States rules warrantless search of an automobile unconstitutional.

March, 1926: On Al Capone's orders, enforcer Tony "Big Tuna" Accardo assassinates Northside racketeer Hymie Weiss outside the Holy Name Cathedral in Chicago.

November, 1926: A Vinlandic-language radio play about a workers revolution causes a panic in New Oslo.

January, 1927: Route 66 links Mojave, California to Chicago, Illinois.

October, 1927: FSA president Montgomery Glover announces that he won't contest the 1928 elections.

December, 1927: In the case Olmstead v. Federated States, the Supreme Court of the Federated States rules that FBI wiretapping, used throughout the previous decade to catch bootleggers, breaches the Fourth Amendment to the Federated States Constitution as a form of unlawful search.

September, 1928: Mojave completes construction of its city hall, at that point the tallest building in Mojave. It uses a façade of alternating pink and yellow stones to reproduce an Inca zigzag pattern. City officials brag that it can withstand any earthquake California chooses to throw at it.

November, 1928: Republican Herbert Hoover defeats democrat Spencer Bowling by a landslide, becoming president of the FSA from 1929 to 1933.

1929: The USSR expels Leon Trotsky. In 1930, Trotsky settles in Chile.

February, 1930: American boxer Marshall Weir knocks out Vinlander Sigurd Kyrre in Ohio to become World Heavyweight Champion. In 1932, he loses the title to Nakai Mahpeeya of the Republic of Yucatán.

August, 1930: A hurricane hits the Eastern shore of Vinland, killing 112 people.

February, 1931: The FSA convicts Al Capone for income tax evasion. Frank Nitti becomes figurehead boss of the Chicago Outfit. Tony "Big Tuna" Accardo becomes caporegime of an Outfit crew in Mojave, specialising in loansharking.

April, 1931: During the so-called 'Castellammarese War', Gangsters Albert Anastasia, Bugsy Siegel and Jimmy "The Shiv" Destefano execute Salvatore Maranzano and "Joe The Boss" Masseria on the streets of Detroit. Lucky Luciano becomes the preeminent gangster in the FSA.
Luciano appoints Anastasia and labour racketeer Louis "Lepke" Buchalter as heads of his enforcement subdivision, soon known as 'Murder Inc.'. By 1940, they've committed over five-hundred murders, operating from the back of a candy store in Indianapolis.

September, 1931: The Mojave Central Library opens at the corner of Pierce Road and Main Street. Terracotta reliefs around the building create a Cherokee herringbone pattern in cream, grey and red.

November, 1931: The Australian submarine Nautilus sinks when it collides with the edge of an undersea trench at a latitude of 61 degrees south.

January, 1932: Unemployment in the Federated States rises to thirty percent.

July, 1932: Three-thousand participants compete in the Mojave Olympics.

February, 1933: Prohibition ends in the FSA when the states ratify the Twenty-First Amendment to the Federated States Constitution (which repeals the Eighteenth Amendment).

March, 1933: David Sigmundson (counterpart to homeline Hollywood producer David O. Selznick) emigrates from New Oslo in Vinland to Mojave, California.

November, 1933: Missouri Governor Franklin Delano Roosevelt defeats Herbert Hoover to become president of the FSA. He will remain in office until his death in 1945.

1934: In a controversial split decision, American boxer Sterling Roach defeats Yucatecan Nakai Mahpeeya to become World Heavyweight Champion. In 1937, he loses the title to American Joe Louis.

1935: After a five-year campaign to curtail the agency's power, Federated States Congress and President Roosevelt disband the FBI.

1936: Teletypewriters see use in the FSA.

1937: Lucky Luciano sends Bugsy Siegel to California to take over Mojave's gambling rackets. Soon, competition from the Chicago Outfit leads to escalating violence on the streets of Mojave. In 1940, Californian Attorney General Earl Warren describes Siegel as the 'Al Capone of Mojave'.

1938: Vigilantes drive three hundred striking agricultural workers from their homes in Grass Valley, California.

1939: Merchants National Trust and Savings opens in Mojave. Its building on Paramount Boulevard in Monterey Park uses an ornamented French style decorated with pink and yellow stones in a Navajo chequerboard pattern.

August, 1940: Leon Trostky survives an assassination attempt by Stalinist agents in Chile. Though bedridden by 1945, he remains alive to the present day.

September, 1940: The Supreme Court of the FSA upholds the right, on grounds of free speech, of FSA citizens to advocate the violent overthrow of the FSA government, her subordinate governments or institutions.

October, 1940: Heavyweight boxing champion Joe Louis retires (undefeated) after contracting tuberculosis. He dies in 1942 at a sanatorium in Billings, Montana. In 1941, the National Boxing Association recognises American Garland Cartwright as World Heavyweight Champion.

January, 1941: At Good Samaritan Hospital in Glendale, Mojave, Willie Sue Vliet gives birth to Don Glen Vliet (counterpart to homeline musician and painter Don Van Vliet, better known as Captain Beefheart).

February, 1941: Radio station W47NV begin broadcasting in Jackson, Mississippi, becoming the first FM radio station in the FSA.

September, 1941: Bugsy Siegel's "Murder Inc." defenestrate criminal informant Abe "Kid Twist" Reles in the presence of an eight-man police bodyguard in Mojave.

October, 1941: KECA Radio open studios on Pacific Avenue in Huntington Park, Mojave. Their building uses a Cree Indian pattern of dark crosses over an ivory-coloured background. By 1946, they have become the most profitable radio station in Mojave.

February, 1942: John H. Johnson begins publishing Negro Digest in Mojave. In 1945, he will introduce Ebony magazine.

March, 1942: At Cedars of Lebanon Hospital in Mojave, Toby Futterman gives birth to Lewis Allen Reed (counterpart to homeline musician Lou Reed).

June, 1942: Reform candidate Acid Chandler defeats incumbent Fletcher Bowron to become Major of Mojave.

August, 1942: Pronto Siete, a Chilean food company founded by soviet exile Leon Trotsky, unveils the 'Slurpee' ice beverage at a tradeshow in Punta Arenas.

September, 1942: Federated States Courthouse opens on Woodland Street in Maywood, Mojave. Its building features an Algonquian pattern of red and white zigzags over a black background.

October, 1942: Open war breaks out between Bugsy Siegel's gang and the Chicago Outfit in Mojave. It ends four months later when the state of California indicts several high-ranking members of the Outfit for extortion.

January, 1943: Despite a notorious record of corruption, former Mayor of Mojave, Frank L. Shaw, defeats Justice Earl Warren to become Governor of California.

February, 1943: The state of California indicts Frank Nitti and other members of the Chicago Outfit for attempting to extort money from Hollywood film studios through their control of labour unions. In March, Nitti commits suicide by the rail tracks near Mojave's Union Station by shooting himself through the head. Tony "Big Tuna" Accardo becomes head of the Outfit in California.

June, 1943: American boxer Junior Tahachee outpoints fellow countryman Garland Cartwright in Wisconsin to become World Heavyweight Champion. Sportswriters describe it as the, "fight of the aeon". In September, Tahachee enlists as a private in the Federated States Army. He travels with the Special Services Division giving exhibition matches throughout Europe. In June, 1945 he returns to live in Mojave, California.

November, 1944: Infinity agents recover twelve machined stones that generate weak parachronic fields from inside the big clock at Union Station in Mojave. Each has a drawing of a unicycle stencilled on to it in white paint.

December, 1944: In the case Korematsu v. Federated States, the Supreme Court of the FSA rules that Executive Order 9066, which allowed the federal government to inter Americans of Japanese descent during WWII, violates the constitution.

February, 1945: Alfred Hitchcock's Spellbound, staring Ingrid Bergman and Gregory Peck, opens in the FSA.

April, 1945: FSA President Franklin Roosevelt dies of a cerebral haemorrhage at the age of sixty-three. Harry S. Truman becomes president of the FSA.

June, 1945: Fifty nations, including the FSA and Vinland, sign the United Nations charter at the War Memorial Opera House in Ohlone, California. Other signatories of note include, Cōzcatlān, France, the Canadian Confederacy, the Paiute League, Czechoslovakia, the Mescalero Confederation, the Republic of China, Zuma Union, the Philippine Commonwealth, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the United Kingdom, Yugoslavia and the League of Twelve Nations.

September, 1945: Infinity recover eight further stones from an open-cage elevator at the Bradbury Building in downtown Mojave. These have drawings of spectacles stencilled on to them, but otherwise appear identical to the twelve recovered from Union Station.

December, 1945: Fire comes out of the brambles and devours Cedars of Lebanon Hospital in Mojave.

1946: Heavyweight boxing champion Junior Tahachee drowns while swimming near Long Beach in Mojave. In February, the National Boxing Association recognises fellow Mojave resident Jimmy Barlow as World Heavyweight Champion.

Divergence Point
1050: Fifty years after Leif Ericsson's discovery of North America, Norse colonists build a permanent settlement on the island of Newfoundland.

Major Civilisations
Western (empire with rivals), Orthodox (empire with satellite states), Chinese (empire with rivals), Islamic (multipolar)

Worldline Data
TL: 7
Mana Level: No mana
Quantum: 6
Infinity Class: P4
Centrum Zone: Orange

Vision quest

2010-07-17T19:32:00.013+10:00

Born in Muddy Waters, Cocopa on Vinland-7, Kiss-the-sky attended the Quechan Lyceum at Limbic Gulch. In 1908, she received a PhD in electrodynamics from the Cocopa Medicine Lodge for Advanced Physics.

At the outbreak of the Third Apache War she accepted a lieutenancy in the Brigade of Engineers. Captured in 1910, she remained a prisoner of war until the capture of Beating Heart in 1912.

After the war, she returned to a lecturing position at the Medicine Lodge of North Maricopa, where her interest swivelled towards thermodynamics. In 1916, she received the Stymbjörnson Award for her contributions to the kinetic-molecular theory of gasses.

In 1918, she accepted a professorship at the Vocational Medicine Lodge of Hualapai, becoming Deputy Shaman of Physics in 1927.

Sometime around 1923, Kiss-the-sky became fascinated by wireless broadcasts transmitted from the Federated States of America. She came to believe that certain radio programs concealed messages directed towards listeners outside the Federated States. By the late twenties, she'd become positive that the radio sportscasts of prizefights in the Federated States somehow pointed the way towards a "hidden medicine lodge" somewhere on the Colorado Plateau. With deepening obsession she poured over maps of the plateau, matching "hints" from those sportscasts to landmarks and sites of historic occurrences.

More and more she disregarded her academic duties. In 1931, the medicine lodge cancelled her professorship.

In 1932, after listening to the title bout between Nakai Mahpeeya and Marshall Weir, she believed she had located her hidden medicine lodge on a tributary of the Grand Canyon between Horseshoe Mesa and Sockdolager Rapids. In the heat of summer she drove out to find it.

She had neglected to eat or sleep for several days. While climbing down the escarpment near Vulcan's Throne she swooned and fell. She banged her head and blacked out.

She recovered consciousness at the bottom of a ravine. A deer stood guard in front of her. It'd come to guide her. It nuzzled her and at its touch all pain left her.

The deer helped her to stand. It led her down the ravine, beneath an overhanging of rock and into an Infinity Patrol surveillance post. When questioned, she said that instructions coded into their radio broadcasts had led her to them.

The personnel on-hand felt that her acute state of fatigue made it unsafe to administer Eraser. Alarmed by her story, they decided to bring her to Homeline.

The subsequent investigation could not determine whether her experience and surrounding events stemmed form anything besides the collision of a delusion with chance. Nor could it determine why the surveillance post had failed to detect her before she blundered into their camp. Footage from cameras covering the approach showed only two deer walking along the ravine.

Kiss-the-sky elected to remain on Homeline. After completing an acclimation course she commenced a degree in paradynamics at Prairie View A&M University in Texas. In Homeline year 2018, she accepted a research position at the Interstate Convocation for Parachronic Research.

In 2023, Kiss-the-sky completed work on four conveyors intended for Patrol missions to Vinland-7, her worldline of origin. She lives in Centennial, Colorado with her husband Nelson and a bull terrier named Snowflake.

Knee breeches

2010-07-14T16:54:00.006+10:00

I find I have a copy of The Military Experience in the Age of Reason on my bookshelf¹. I assume I must've purchased it for its cover art. Could I ever, in sincerity, have doubted the general tenor of that 'experience'? Could I have imagined that soldiers woke up in the morning and thought, "My do I enjoy catching diseases out here in the mud. Not a day goes by that I don't thank providence for the string of circumstances that led to my becoming an artillery target in the Austrian Plumed-Hat Corps."?

Endnote:

(Christopher Duffy, Wordsworth Editions Limited: Hertfordshire, 1998).

Sky's conveyors

2010-07-12T02:25:00.005+10:00

Original licences: Kiss-the-sky, Interstate Convocation for Parachronic Research
In service: 2024-

An unchanging pattern of pink and green zigzags overspreads each of Sky's conveyors. The relentless alternation of contrasting colours exhausts the eye. Individuals immersed in such patterns for long periods may enter a state of sensory deprivation from which hallucinations arise. For patrolmen preparing to jump, these hallucinations appear to offer insight into parachronic processes. Patrolmen who've spent a day or more surrounded by such patterns may halve the time required to make jump computations.

Each conveyor carries two message drones, a searchlight, flare launcher, siren and set of flashing lights. Clocks built into the conveyors replace the hour numbers with the names of the twelve apostles of Christ.

ISC Allen Ginsberg

Appearance:	Beach bathing box painted with pink and green zigzags
Mobility:	None
Jump capacity:	2000kg
Empty mass:	1200kg
Crew:	Jump station, Medical station
Length:	2.4m
Width:	2.0m
Height:	2.0m
Interior volume:	5.8 m³
Sensors:	Parachronic detector, Radiation detector, Camera sight, Searchlight (range 1km)
Manipulators:	None
Weapons:	None
Communications:	Two message drones, Encrypted long-range radio (range 100km), Flare launcher, Siren and flashing lights
Power:	Electrochemical fuel cell, Backup electrical motor
Shielding:	Sand proofing,
Other systems:	Fire escape chute, Security system (-3 to Lockpicking, Traps, Electronics Operation, and Computer Operation rolls to circumvent; encryption strength equals complexity 8)
Projector rolls:	+1
Jump rolls:	+0 (-3 during daylight)
ST/HP:	25†
HT:	10 (7 for electrical shock)
SM:	+3
DR:	5 semi-ablative
Notes:

ISC Grace Slick

Appearance:	Railway signal cabin painted with pink and green zigzags
Mobility:	None
Jump capacity:	5000kg
Empty mass:	2400kg
Crew:	Jump station, Communications station, Medical station, Buzzbot monitor station
Length:	4.2m
Width:	3.0m
Height:	8.0m
Interior volume:	50.0 m³
Sensors:	Parachronic detector, Laser rangefinder, Radiation detector, Coquelicot searchlight (range 500m)
Manipulators:	None
Weapons:	Sticky foam launcher
Communications:	Two message drones, Encrypted long-range radio (range 100km), Infrared communicator (range 50m), Flare launcher, Siren and flashing lights
Power:	Electrochemical fuel cell, Solar power array, Backup electrical motor
Shielding:	None
Other systems:	Buzzbot, Security system (-4 to Lockpicking, Traps, Electronics Operation, and Computer Operation rolls to circumvent; encryption strength equals complexity 9), Bathtub, Fire extinguishers
Projector rolls:	+2
Jump rolls:	+2
ST/HP:	50†
HT:	10c (7 for electrical shock)
SM:	+5
DR:	10 ablative
Notes:	Twenty minutes before each jump, the crew must active a pre-jump system that floods the interior of the conveyor with seawater. They then operate their stations wearing diving helmets.

ISC Jello Biafra

Appearance:	Street dumpster painted with pink and green zigzags
Mobility:	None
Jump capacity:	5000kg
Empty mass:	4000kg
Crew:	Jump station, Medical station
Length:	5.7m
Width:	3.5m
Height:	2.5m
Interior volume:	20.0 m³
Sensors:	Parachronic detector, Global Positioning System (+3 to Navigation rolls), Quantum analyser, Searchlight (range 1km)
Manipulators:	None
Weapons:	None
Communications:	Two message drones, Flare launcher, Encrypted radio (range 10km) Siren and flashing lights
Power:	Electrochemical fuel cell, Backup electrical motor
Shielding:	Radiation shielding, Water and gas seal
Other systems:	Fire extinguishers, Climate control, Security system (-3 to Lockpicking, Traps, Electronics Operation, and Computer Operation rolls to circumvent; encryption strength equals complexity 8), Hammocks, Refrigerated compartment (0.5³)
Projector rolls:	+0
Jump rolls:	+0 (-5 at night)
ST/HP:	75†
HT:	9 (6 for electrical shock)
SM:	+4
DR:	10
Notes:	A sealed box near the jump station reads, "Antimatter trap"

ISC Jack Kerouac

Appearance:	Shuttered bus shelter painted with pink and green zigzags
Mobility:	None
Jump capacity:	2000kg
Empty mass:	1000kg
Crew:	Jump station, Security station, Medical station
Length:	2.5m
Width:	1.4m
Height:	2.2m
Interior volume:	3.9 m³
Sensors:	Parachronic detector, 360° camera system, Searchlight (range 1km)
Manipulators:	None
Weapons:	Crewmembers can electrify the outer surface, like an electric fence, which will also interfere with nearby telephone and radio communication
Communications:	Two message drones, Infrared communicator (range 50m), Flare launcher, Siren and flashing lights
Power:	Electrochemical fuel cell, Backup electrical motor
Shielding:	Electrical shielding, Radiation shielding (with shutter deployed)
Other systems:	Fire extinguisher, Security system (-3 to Lockpicking, Traps, Electronics Operation, and Computer Operation rolls to circumvent; encryption strength equals complexity 8), Jacob's ladder, A dense but radiant muffin
Projector rolls:	+0
Jump rolls:	+2 (-3 at temperatures below 20 degrees Celsius)
ST/HP:	25†
HT:	9
SM:	+2
DR:	20 vs piercing, crushing and corrosion; 10 vs all other damage types
Notes:

Loadouts

Besides crewmen, the basic mission loadout for each of the conveyors comprises:

one megaphone
three pneumospray hypos
three pocket calculators
three pocketknives
one extensible baton
one police riot shield with the words 'riot shield' written on it
twenty pieces of writing chalk
two lorry batteries
one polygraph set
one twenty-four-hour candle
three rolls of duct tape
one television antenna
three pairs of handcuffs
three egg whisks
one TL5 caplock pistol and seventeen bullets

Poodles

2010-07-04T13:59:00.001+10:00

Without any warning, my neighbour put three poodles in his yard. He went from none to three in a single black afternoon. After that he paid them little attention. As far as you could tell, they never left the yard. From morning until night they bombarded the neighbourhood with shrill barrages of barking that tore your concentration in two. They'd cease just long enough to let you collect your thoughts back together before shattering them again with the next barrage.

When home, their owner would bawl at them to shut up from behind his screen door. On other evenings, enraged neighbours assumed the role. It seemed like just a matter of time before some neighbour rationalised euthanizing them with poisoned meatballs.

I think their bawling God must've perplexed them. Why had it delivered them out of the pet store only to freeze them in its backyard?

In their loneliness, they turned to a new El Shaddai. One of them began to imitate the sirens of ambulances zooming to the hospital on Clayton road. It would listen to the siren,

"reeeeeeee-orrrrrrrr-reeeeee-orrrrrr-reeeeeee-orrrrrrrrr-reeeee-orrrrr",

and then answer back,

"arooooooo-orrrrrrrrrrr-ooooooo-orrrrrrrrr-oooooooo-orrrrrrrrrrrr-oooooo-orrrrrrr".

I think they must've envisioned its source as an illimitable dog, hurtling past at a hundred miles an hour.

Moustaches

2010-06-25T15:54:00.006+10:00

Colin, Owen and I filmed two little videos last year,

for which I grew a pencil moustache (the kind phone salesmen grow to look like Gomez Addams).

Among the 'related videos' for the second one YouTube now includes one named 'pedophile beards'. It seems unjust that I can't include this fact on my résumé.

Colin

2010-06-22T01:18:00.000+10:00

I bundle out of the train in short-pants and find a phone box to call Colin. I've started explaining where to meet me when Colin screams and I hear the receiver clatter against the tabletop.

When he comes back on a few minutes later, Colin explains that from his kitchen window, he saw his car start to roll back down the slope out of his garage. He ran out of his house and slapsticked along beside it trying to get the key into the lock as it picked up speed, rolled down the slope and through the neighbour's fence in front of an audience of staring children.

The car came to a halt. The children waited in silence to see what he'd do next. Colin looked at them, stepped back and gave a bow.

Xanthochroi

2010-06-18T03:59:00.009+10:00

Growing up with the TAC's gruesome road safety advertisements has left many of us in Victoria with a tremulous fear of road accidents. You can watch a horrific montage drawn from twenty years of them at TAC Victoria's YouTube channel:

http://www.youtube.com/user/TACVictoria?feature=pyv&ad=3989203461&kw=tac%20ads&gclid=CJu3w_KP2p8CFY8tpAod8x4wHA#p/u/0/Z2mf8DtWWd8

By the time you get to the crashes, it feels like scalding yourself over and over with coffee.

Notice something about the victims and drivers: out of two-hundred-odd actors and actresses, every single one of them looks like a white European.

This morning, I hazarded guesses about the ethnicities of passengers who shared the bus with me. Ignoring complexities of ethnicity in favour of convenient categories, I counted three light-skinned Caucasians (myself included), three Indians, eight East Asians, three Mediterraneans, a Latino and a jet-black African. But the TAC's accidents take place on the honkiest street in whitesville.

This afternoon, I phoned the TAC to ask why. I wondered, for instance, whether it responded to some review of accident statistics that'd found a disproportionate number of white people among the victims.

The call centre employee against whom I unleashed this question thought that improbable. Instead he speculated that it came down to casting practices at their advertising agency, Gray Advertising. Their corporate affairs manager, Joe Calafiore, thought it more likely just chance (though he agreed that out of twenty years worth of television commercials he could think of none with anything besides white, occidental drivers and victims).

My Chinese optometrist wonders whether, to make their commercials feel more realistic to viewers, the advertiser might've felt it needed to give us the honky-town it thinks we expect. Would even "Multicultural Dave" the chirpy, clean-cut Chinese friend stray too close to reality?

Illusions

2010-06-09T13:07:00.005+10:00

Al Seckel has sandwiched some enthralling illusions between the covers of his Incredible Visual Illusions¹. Aficionados will find many of them over-familiar, but the rest of us will enjoy the quick jaunt through different types of visual illusion. It includes Akiyoshi Kitaoka's Distorted Figure:

http://www.sevenextraeyes.org/andy-social/distortedfigure.jpg

Roger Shepard's Beckoning Balustrade:

http://www.sevenextraeyes.org/andy-social/beckoningbalustrade.jpg

Isia Leviant's Enigma:

http://www.sevenextraeyes.org/andy-social/enigma.jpg

Dejan Todorović's Gradient Chessboard Illusion:

http://www.sevenextraeyes.org/andy-social/gradientchessboard.jpg

And Baingio Pinna's enticing Intertwining Illusion:

http://www.sevenextraeyes.org/andy-social/intertwining.jpg

Footnote:

(Al Seckel, Incredible Visual Illusions: An astonishing collection that includes classic optical illusions as well as scintillating and pulsating graphic patterns, compiled by the world's leading authority on visual illusions, Chartwell Books, 2006).

Diagram (ISC Aldous Huxley)

2010-06-08T10:31:00.001+10:00

This shows the diagram for the ISC Aldous Huxley:

http://www.sevenextraeyes.org/andy-social/diaghuxley.gif

ISC Aldous Huxley

2010-06-06T06:54:00.015+10:00

Original licence: Maple Ridge Institute of Parachronology
In service: 2004-

Infinity's smallest conveyor looks like a packing crate with the words 'Tortilla Chips' printed across the top. Its size allows squads to jump into tight spaces, such as gaol cells or bank vaults. Once they arrive, its light weight and robustness makes it easy to transport. In a pinch, the crewmembers can carry it.

For flexibility, squads will sometimes carry the Aldous Huxley as cargo inside another conveyor.

In 1999, a quondam protégé of Infinity founder Paul Van Zandt named Rudolf Kreutzer purloined a prototype of the Aldous Huxley from a research institution in British Columbia. When he tried to jump off-world in it, the prototype malfunctioned. The prototype remained on homeline, but Kreutzer disappeared into the void. No homeline agency has found a trace of him since.

ISC Aldous Huxley

Appearance:	Large packing box marked "Tortilla chips"
Mobility:	None
Jump capacity:	600kg
Empty mass:	200kg
Crew:	Standing room only
Length:	1.2m
Width:	1.2m
Height:	2.2m
Interior volume:	1.9 m³
Sensors:	Parachronic detector
Manipulators:	None
Weapons:	None
Communications:	None
Power:	Electrochemical fuel cell, Backup electrical motor
Shielding:	None
Other systems:	None
Projector rolls:	+0
Jump rolls:	+0
ST/HP:	25†
HT:	11 (8 for electrical shock)
SM:	+1
DR:	10 (30 vs falls and collisions)
Notes:	Designed for maximum resistance to falls and other collisions.

Loadouts

Besides crewmembers, the basic mission payload for the ISC Aldous Huxley comprises:

two wallets of prestigious-looking credit cards
one five-kilo charge of TNT disguised as a Bible

Motoring

2010-06-03T13:11:00.007+10:00

I swing into the bottle shop with just enough fuel left to reach the petrol station on the corner. They've invited me to dinner twenty kilometres away in Southbank. By emptying my change jar, I've collected together seven dollars and fifty cents to divide between petrol and the bottle of wine I've said I'll bring. Every cent I save on the wine improves the car's odds of getting there.

I locate a five-dollar bottle of rosé and then start foraging for something even cheaper to undercut it.

"Did you come for red or white?" says the shopkeeper.

"Either," I say, "I just need to take a bottle for dinner."

"Fair enough," he says, "what sort of price range did you have in mind?"

"This man stole my girlfriend," I say.

The sympathising shopkeeper helps me pick out a three-dollar red made from raisin grapes. Instead of using the word 'wine' anywhere, the label describes the contents as 'alcoholised grape product'.

Alien women

2010-05-31T19:12:00.016+10:00

In the book of Leviticus, God reveals further commandments conceived in the all-encompassing fire of limitless intellect. For example, from Lamsa's translation,

"And the Lord spoke to Moses, saying,
Say to the children of Israel or of the proselytes who sojourn in Israel who shall cast any of his semen into an alien woman...the people of the land shall stone him with stones.
And I will pour out my anger against that man and will cut him off from among his people; because he cast his semen into an alien woman to defile my sanctuary and to profane my holy name.
And if the people of the land do in any way ignore the offense of the man who has cast of his semen into an alien woman, that they may not kill him,
Then I will set my anger against that man and against his family, and will cut him off and all who go astray after him, because they go astray after alien women from among their people."¹

The advantage this could confer to an ancient people hoping to preserve themselves as a distinct group seems clear enough, but one wonders how the modern believer contorts it into a decree acceptable to modern sensibilities.

Through what manoeuvres does he seek to reconcile this ostensible anti-miscegenation injunction with modern life? One might expect he'd have centuries of pious circumcogitation to draw on, but Lamsa's translation departs here from the translations employed by most English-language commentators. Parallel passages from such versions instead forbid incinerating infants in sacrifice to the horned god Moloch².

Footnotes:

Leviticus 20:1-5 (Holy Bible from the Ancient Eastern Text: George M. Lamsa's Translation from the Aramaic of the Peshitta, Harper Collins Publishers). Quoted without ellipsis in comments.
For example, in the Amplified Bible,
"And the Lord said to Moses,
Moreover, you shall say to the Israelites, Any one of the Israelites or of the strangers that sojourn in Israel who gives any of his children to Molech [the fire god worshiped with human sacrifices]...the people of the land shall stone him with stones.
I also will set My face against that man [opposing him, withdrawing My protection from him, and excluding him from My covenant] and will cut him off from among his people, because he has given of his children to Molech, defiling My sanctuary and profaning My holy name.
And if the people of the land do at all hide their eyes from the man when he gives one of his children [as a burnt offering] to Molech [the fire god] and they overlook it or neglect to take legal action to punish him, winking at his sin, and do not kill him [as My law requires],
Then I will set My face against that man and against his family and will cut him off from among their people, him and all who follow him to [unfaithfulness to Me, and thus] play the harlot after Molech."
Leviticus 20:1-5 (Amplified Bible, Zondervan Publishing House)

A high-resolution jpeg of Blake's The Flight of Moloch appears at,

http://www.blakearchive.org/exist/blake/archive/object.xq?objectid=but538.1.wc.05&java=no

(Illustrations to Milton's "On the Morning of Christ's Nativity", The Thomas Set, Whitworth Art Gallery, University of Manchester, Department of Prints and Drawings)

"First Moloch, horrid king besmeared with blood
Of human sacrifice, and parents' tears,
Through the noise of drums and timbrels loud
Their children's cries unheard, that passed through fire
To his grim idol. Him the Ammonite
Worshiped in Rabba and her watery plain,
In Argob and in Basan, to the stream
Of Utmost Arnon. Nor content with such
Audacious neighborhood, the wisest heart
Of Solomon he led by fraud to build
His temple right against the temple of God
The Pleasant valley of Hinnom, Tophet thence
And black Gehenna called, the type of Hell.
Next Chemos, the obscene dread of Moab's sons,
From Aroer to Nebo, and the wild
Of southmost Abarim; in Hesebon
And Horonaim, Seon's realm, beyond
The flowery dale of Sibma clad with vines,
And Elealè to the Asphaltic pool.
Peor his other name, when he enticed
Israel in Sittim on their march from Nile
To do whim wanton rites, which cost them woe.
Yet thence his lustful orgies he enlarged
Even to that hill of scandal, by the grove
Of Moloch homicide, lust hard by hate;
Till good Josiah drove them thence to Hell."
The Portable Milton (Paradise Lost, John Milton, The Viking Press: New York, 1987)

Royal Park Reds

2010-05-24T20:25:00.007+10:00

In all probability, Marxist sport associations have existed for as long as universities have funded student clubs. After nine meetings over boiled lentils, a few may even have contrived to play their first games. However one communist cricket club in Melbourne, called 'The Royal Park Reds', has fielded teams for more than thirty years.

Amateur cricket clubs in Australia play on two types of pitches: turf and matting. The former refers to the type of pitch professionals use: prepared strips of grass cared for by groundskeepers (often at copious expense); the latter to a concrete pitch dressed on the day with Astroturf mats brought by the teams.

Founded in 1979, the Royal Park Reds started out playing on matting pitches within the North Suburban Cricket Association (NSCA). According to an old friend inside the club, at the annual meeting in 1985 a clique of members stunned the rest by contending that the time had come for the club to move up to turf pitches. In response, the others announced that they regarded playing on the expensive turf pitches as a bourgeois affectation. Almost, as an act of treachery against the revolution.

The difference proved irreconcilable. In the end, the club fissured into two communist factions: the Reds, who now play on turf pitches in the nearby Mercantile Cricket Association, and the Royal Park Reds, who continue to bat for the class struggle on matting pitches within the NSCA.

Domestic

2010-05-22T07:25:00.002+10:00

Avi and Lis have put some boxes in my front room until they get back from overseas. I get a kick out of this one every time I see it:

http://www.sevenextraeyes.org/andy-social/avibox.jpg

Benji

2010-05-19T11:24:00.006+10:00

We spent the month after our refrigerator entered Valhalla eating canned goods and Saltines. When they delivered the new refrigerator at last, Ken and Benji helped us shuffle it into the apartment. It looked like the fridge IKEA would sell you - a white, enamelled box with no curves or decoration.

Hilary and I dashed out to the supermarket. We placed Ken in charge of the fridge. When we left, its unrelieved cleanliness made it look like a vector model with the textures turned off. By the time we got back forty minutes later, Benji had written, "Phear My Elite Skillz" across the front of it in indelible marker. We found them trying to scrub it off with methylated spirits.

I don't think we ever asked Benji what possessed him to do this. We both sensed that it would prove unexplainable.

Goats

2010-05-17T11:21:00.004+10:00

Years ago, in the intolerable heat of late December, I found myself stuck in the checkout queue at Coles. Somebody had told the man in front of me that if he drove in from Rosebud, Coles would sell him a whole goat. The preposterousness of the incident gave the employees some much needed respite from the toil of the Christmas season, so in spite of the rush, four of them ministered to him. It made tough going for the caprinophage. However plausible his accusations, four employees stood on hand to deny them.

"But I confirmed it," he said.

"No, sir," said the manager, "you must've misheard whomever you talked to."

"We can't sell whole animals," said the woman from the delicatessen.

"So why did you tell me you could on the phone?" he said.

"You must've misheard," repeated the manager.

"No," he said, "to make sure I hadn't misheard, after you said you had them I said, 'do you know I want a whole goat, with four legs and a body and a head with horns?' and you said, 'yes'."

"You wanted goat horns?" said the salesgirl.

"Goats have horns," he said.

"We wouldn't have confirmed it once you made it clear like that," said the manager.

"You did confirm it," he said, "Then I said, 'do you have the goat there in the store now?' and you said 'yes'. So I said, 'ok, I will drive in now from Rosebud to buy it'."

"She-goats don't have horns," said the woman from produce.

"Both goats have horns," he replied.

"Not the she-goat," she said.

"Maybe you called a different store," said the manager.

They kept this up for ten minutes. I think some Coles regulation forbade the manager from just pointing out the obvious realities of working in retail. At no point did she point out that, in all likelihood, for the sake of his or her sanity, the person he talked to had paid no attention to his question and then just confirmed whatever he wanted to confirm as a matter of reflex. That, to stay sane, the employees isolated their conscious minds from the drudgery of working there and just operated on reflex. You want us to spend all day bagging your groceries? How can you blame us if we can only shrink our souls down small enough to do it by becoming sleepwalkers?

A week later, I heard the bleating.

At first, I supposed that one of my neighbours owned something that sounded like a goat. A novelty doorbell struck me as the most probable culprit, but when I went out to vandalise it, the sound led me, instead, to the yard beside unit 3. Through the fence, I could hear the sounds of a goat or sheep bleating and moving around.

Over the coming week, I made a few attempts to visit the animal, but I could never catch its owner at home. I wonder if he may've gone away for the week, given its ceaseless bleating. I tried to imagine real estate agents in the area trying to explain the noise to prospective house buyers.

Terry Manos

2010-05-07T06:50:00.001+10:00

Born in the Melbourne suburb of Wheelers Hill in 1982, Terry Manos received his primary education under the Assemblies of God at Lighthouse Christian College in Keysborough.

At age fifteen, Manos quit school to work for his brother's slimming products company in Gladstone Park. Three years later, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission charged his brother with trading standards offences over the ineffectiveness of their nostrums. The crown prosecutor later added a charge of reckless endangerment when chemical testing identified the company's 'Slim-u-fast' drink powder as crushed pencil shavings.

In 2000, the National Australia Day Council awarded Manos its Young Australian of the Year Award for rescuing a gunshot victim from a park in Barrington Crescent near his workplace.

Manos returned to school in 2001. After completing high school at Carey Baptist Grammar School in Kew, he enrolled in a Bachelor of Commerce degree at Monash University. He supported himself by working as a door-to-door salesman for a company that sold thigh-reduction cream. In 2003, the Supreme Court of Victoria found the company's directors guilty of trading while insolvent and appointed liquidators to wind it up.

After finishing his baccalaureate in 2004, Manos started an unincorporated company called Upland Incorporated. The company began as a leasing agent for slot machines and evolved into a leading investment brokerage specialising in large-scale acquisitions of Australian assets by international investors. In 2008, after a successful campaign to revoke the site's world heritage listing, Upland Incorporated arranged the sale of Uluru to a consortium of French business interests.

In 2009, the United Nations Crisis Ministry arrested Manos for conspiring to influence the deliberations of the World Heritage Committee through the use of Eraser. While in prison, Manos commenced a doctoral degree in Computational Parachronics at the Open University of Sri Lanka. Three weeks before his release in 2014, he received his PhD.

After his release, Manos formed a new company called Paraquip, hoping to compete for contracts to equip outworld ventures. In 2015, the Victorian Fraud Squad arrested Manos for using fraudulent documents to obtain credit for the company. However, the case collapsed when the state's key witness, Erica Eld, disappeared offworld. Although acquitted, Manos resigned as Paraquip's director under pressure from his creditors.

Manos joined Monash University's Parachronic Commercialization Group in 2016. In 2019, he completed work on four conveyors disguised as boats from different epochs of history.

Erica Eld returned to homeline in 2020. When questioned by Infinity Customs and Inspection, she claimed that Manos had paid her $500,000 to disappear offworld for several years. Following a police investigation, the High Court of Victoria convicted Manos of conspiracy to pervert the course of justice, sentencing him to a minimum five years jail.

After his release in 2025, Manos retired to Bendigo, where he authored the bestselling erotic thriller, Murder at Balls Deep.

Diagrams (Manos' conveyors)

2010-05-04T09:21:00.005+10:00

This shows the diagrams for Manos' conveyors:

http://www.sevenextraeyes.org/andy-social/diagmanos.gif

Manos' conveyors

2010-05-01T09:38:00.024+10:00

Original licences: Terry Manos, Monash University Parachronic Commercialization Group
In service: 2020-

Dr. Manos designed his conveyors as boats from different eras of history. Although indistinguishable by sight from other watercraft of their era, each commands a significant lead over comparable vessels in both speed and manoeuvrability.

The ISC Björk and ISC Hubert Sumlin use waterjets for propulsion. The ISC Werner Herzog uses a paddlewheel. The ISC Boudicca uses sails for long voyages, with oars for short bursts of speed.

Each conveyor carries two message drones, a radar jammer, a sonar communicator or long-range infrared communicator and an encrypted radio. Other notable contraptions include a radar and sonar deception system on the ISC Hubert Sumlin employing superior-to-homeline technology, a trauma pod onboard the ISC Werner Herzog, a parachronic research laboratory built into the ISC Boudicca and an Atari 2600 game console on the ISC Björk with high scores attributed to members of Woodrow Wilson's first cabinet.

Last year, Centrum's Interworld Service captured a Björk model conveyor allocated to a Contact team on Hieratic-2. We don't know yet whether they learned anything that could jeopardise the model's security.

ISC Boudicca

Appearance:	Ancient boat with a prow shaped like a pig's head
Mobility:	Has both sails and oars (maximum sailing speed: approx. 20km/h in good wind)
Jump capacity:	4000kg
Empty mass:	1000kg
Crew:	Jump station, Medical station, Six oars plus sailing crew positions (each oar can accommodate up to three oarsmen)
Length:	10.8m at longest point; 8.0m at waterline
Width:	4.0m
Height:	1.9m keel to gunwale; 8.5m keel to top of mainmast
Interior volume:	25.0 m³
Sensors:	Parachronic research laboratory (grants +3 to Electronics Operation (Sensors) and Physics (Parachronic) rolls to detect or analyze parachronic phenomena), Sidereal chronolog, Sonar (range 200m under water, 20m out of water)
Manipulators:	None
Weapons:	Teargas launchers to bow and stern
Communications:	Two message drones, Whale song projector, Sonar communicator (range 1km through water, 10m through air)
Power:	Electrochemical fuel cell, Mainsail and headsail rigged abaft separate, dismountable masts, Fusion reactor, Backup electrical motor
Shielding:	Radiation shielding, Electrical shielding, Water and gas seal (with canopy closed)
Other systems:	Self-destruct system, Radar and sonar jammer (uses superior-to-homeline technology from the Republic of New Afrika on Theophany-5), Shield canopy (protects and seals entire vehicle when deployed), Beer tap dispensing Shiltz Beer with sunshine vitamin D, Security system (-5 to Lockpicking, Traps, Electronics Operation, and Computer Operation rolls to circumvent; encryption strength: complexity 10), Ultrasound dishwasher (marked in Hindi with the publicity logo of something called the, "Bhaskara-III Project")
Projector rolls:	+1
Jump rolls:	+1
ST/HP:	50†
HT:	12
SM:	+4
DR:	100 vs piercing and cutting; 50 vs all other damage types (sailcloth has DR 1)
Notes:

ISC Björk

Appearance:	Powerboat painted with pink and green polka dots
Mobility:	Motorised boat (draught 30cm, cruising speed 70 km/h (40 knots), maximum speed 100 km/h (55 knots) laden, 0-50 km/h in 5 seconds, consumes 60 litres of fuel per 100km, Handling +2, Stability Rating 4)
Jump capacity:	4000kg
Empty mass:	3500kg
Crew:	Jump station, Pilot's seat (pilot rolls against Boating (Motorboat))
Length:	6.5m at longest point; 5.7m at waterline
Width:	3.0m
Height:	2.5m
Interior volume:	15.0 m³
Sensors:	Parachronic detector, Global Positioning System (+3 to Navigation rolls), Green searchlight labelled "death ray" (range 1km)
Manipulators:	None
Weapons:	None
Communications:	Two message drones, Dye marker, Encrypted radio (range 10km), Sonar communicator (range 1km through water, 10m through air), Bullhorn
Power:	Electrochemical fuel cell, Internal combustion engine and waterjet (TL7, 200 litre fuel tank), Backup electrical motor
Shielding:	Radiation shielding, Sand proofing, Electrical shielding
Other systems:	Bilge pump, Radar jammer (uses superior-to-homeline technology from the Free City of Tri-Insula on Saratoga-3), Atari 2600 game console with high scores attributed to members of Woodrow Wilson's first cabinet, Security system (-3 to Lockpicking, Traps, Electronics Operation, and Computer Operation rolls to circumvent; encryption strength: complexity 8), Jacklines, Insect pheromone emitter
Projector rolls:	-1 to send; -2 to retrieve
Jump rolls:	-1
ST/HP:	75
HT:	11f
SM:	+3
DR:	5
Notes:

ISC Hubert Sumlin

Appearance:	Fibreglass "narco" submarine
Mobility:	Semi-submersible motorised boat (glides just below the waterline with an exhaust pipe and fin poking up into the air; maximum launch mass 7200 kg; cruising speed 20 km/h (11 knots), maximum speed 30 km/h (16 knots); consumes 60 litres of fuel per 100km; cannot dive; Handling +0, Stability Rating 3)
Jump capacity:	5000kg
Empty mass:	1400kg (with 60 litres of fuel)
Crew:	Jump station, Pilot's position
Length:	9.5m
Width:	1.5m
Height:	1.5m body; 1.9m from top of fin
Interior volume:	6.1 m³
Sensors:	Parachronic detector, Global Positioning System (+3 to Navigation rolls), Sonar (range 200m under water, 20m out of water), Radar warning receiver, Water pressure gauge, Thermal-imaging system
Manipulators:	None
Weapons:	None
Communications:	Two message drones disguised as urns, Encrypted long-range radio (range 100km), Sonar communicator (range 1km through water, 10m through air)
Power:	Six-stroke gasoline engine (TL8, 2000 litre fuel tank), Electrochemical fuel cell
Shielding:	Water and gas seal, Electrical shielding
Other systems:	Radar and sonar jamming and deception system (uses superior-to-homeline technology from the People's Republic of the North Star on Libration-3), Hidden compartments, Self-destruct system, Bilge pump, Life jackets, Security system (-5 to Lockpicking, Traps, Electronics Operation, and Computer Operation rolls to circumvent; encryption strength: complexity 10)
Projector rolls:	+0
Jump rolls:	+0
ST/HP:	50
HT:	9f
SM:	+3
DR:	5 (upper surface has DR 10)
Notes:	Cramped; crewmembers have to crawl around.

ISC Werner Herzog

Appearance:	Paddle steamer
Mobility:	Paddle ship (draught 50cm, maximum speed 15 km/h, Handling -2, Stability Rating 6)
Jump capacity:	60,000kg
Empty mass:	47,000kg
Crew:	Jump station, Pilothouse, Medical station
Length:	20.0m
Width:	6.8m
Height:	7.5m (main deck 2.5m; promenade deck 5.0m)
Interior volume:	400.0 m³
Sensors:	Parachronic detector, Radiation detector, Quantum analyser
Manipulators:	Retractable crane arm (ST 100)
Weapons:	None
Communications:	Two message drones, Long-range encrypted radio (range 100km), Long-range infrared communicator (range 500m), Horn, Flagpole
Power:	Electrochemical fuel cell, Wood-burning steam engine (TL5), Backup electrical motor
Shielding:	None
Other systems:	Bilge pump, Trauma pod, Daguerreotype camera, Radar jammer (uses superior-to-homeline technology from Independent Long Island on Intron-1), Phonograph (marked, "Official Property of the Carthaginian Intelligence Bureau"), Player piano, Weather cloths (made from a watertight polyamide fabric that looks like canvas), Security system (-4 to Lockpicking, Traps, Electronics Operation, and Computer Operation rolls to circumvent; encryption strength: complexity 9)
Projector rolls:	-1
Jump rolls:	-1
ST/HP:	250
HT:	10c
SM:	+8
DR:	20 ablative (chimneys DR 50)
Notes:	Painted in red and white chequerboard. Jump control console replicates a dashboard from a 1969 Buick.

Loadouts

Besides crewmen, the basic mission loadout for each of the conveyors comprises:

three fire extinguishers
one hang glider with the logo of the Monash University Roleplayers on it
one iRobot Roomba brand autonomous vacuum cleaner
three watchmakers' hammers
one analogue sampling oscilloscope with moths living in it
four police truncheons
one armoured cuirass
one crowbar
one twenty kilogram fire safe
two full-length mirrors
two windup clocks

Impressive

2010-04-27T02:34:00.008+10:00

Visiting Matt and Darryl meant sneaking through the lair of a cranky, nocturnal gremlin that had lodged itself in their living room. Tread too hard on a loose floorboard and it would jolt awake. In almost one breath it would shout obscenities, accuse you of freaking it out, demand to know your name and ask to borrow twenty dollars until Sunday.

The gremlin had a fringe of long hair around the edges of a bald scalp. In front, a silvered chain linked a piercing through its nose to a piercing in its right ear. Out in public it affected a knobbed staff and a billowing khaki duffle coat. In Darryl's living room it wore a bathrobe (supplemented on occasion by something it'd "found spare" in Darryl's clothes hamper).

It had come to nest there by such gradual steps that it took months before either of the housemates realised it aimed to stay.

Years beforehand, as a student in New Zealand, it had discovered that it could claim a student loan and receive the total sum, meant to support it through its whole undergraduate degree, as a single payment.

After spending the money on drugs, it scoured the federal grants system for a new source of obligation-free cash.

That year, hoping to induce more citizens to run in the federal elections, New Zealand's electoral commission introduced a scheme to grant independent candidates the money to run their campaigns. But, evincing a rudimentary appreciation of the potential for abuse, they would only fork over the money if a poll they conducted found that at least some certain percentage of the candidate's electorate said they might vote for him.

Their pollsters executed the poll by reciting the list of candidates to people over the phone in alphabetical order and then asking them which ones they might vote for. The gremlin decided that if it changed its name to something catchy, other stoners might say they might vote for it on the strength of its name alone.

It worked. By changing its name to, 'Very Impressive', it garnered enough interest during the poll to meet the minimum percentage.

After spending the money on drugs, Mr. Impressive found himself charged with embezzlement, electoral finance fraud and defrauding the student loans scheme. He fled to Australia.

Very had some slight acquaintance with Darryl from back in Christchurch. When he first materialised at Darryl's door, he just asked to spend the night on his sofa. At dinner the next day, he explained that, after trying all day, he still hadn't gotten in touch with the friend whose apartment he'd arranged to mind. Would it put them out too much if he stayed until the end of the weekend?

"No, of course not," they said.

A few days later he said that he'd organised to move in with his sister instead, but she wouldn't return from out-of-town until next weekend. Could he linger until then?

"Sure," they said.

A week later, Impressive again explained how circumstances had conspired to maroon him in their living room for just a little while longer. The week became a fortnight. The fortnight, a month. The month, three months. Then six months. Then a year.

Meanwhile, he devoured every scrap of food in the house. He began selling drugs out of their living room. Paranoid that somebody might swipe his stash, he divided it into dozens of little packages and hid them throughout the house. Matt and Darryl would find them stuffed into Pringles tins in the attic, inside sofa cushions, behind their drainpipes and floorboards or taped behind the toilet cistern like Michael's gun in The Godfather.

Once, after more than a year, they managed to kick Impressive out, only to have him cajole his way in again. So the second time round, they took the time to do it right. As when fumigating to remove any pest from a house, they knew they would need to vacate the premises themselves for several days.

When Impressive left the house one evening, Matt threw his Grateful Dead albums out into the street and hired an afterhours locksmith to change all the locks. Then they went to stay with friends and relatives until the air cleared.

Reconnaissance missions they mounted in Matt's car suggest that Impressive loitered around the front of the house for at least a couple of days thereafter. Taking no chances, they waited a full week before they returned.

Peru

2010-04-20T22:36:00.014+10:00

Last September, the 7-Eleven chain of convenience stores rotated in a new promotional placard for their Slurpee ice beverage. I can no more apprehend its meaning now than I could then. Underneath the words "Slurpee Kick" it showed a donkey from behind approaching a sunlit adobe village. Looking back over its shoulder the donkey informed us that "the time has come to flick the ears of danger amigos".

Hold up. Did they just describe the beverage as dangerous?

They seemed to assert that "the time has come to flick the ears of danger" by drinking a slurpee. But unless they alluded to the long-term danger of contracting diabetes, I couldn't imagine what they could mean.

This shows a concurrent placard with the same slogan:

http://www.sevenextraeyes.org/andy-social/earsofdanger.jpg

When I mentioned it to Prince Avigdor, he tried to explain it by cupping his privates with one hand and shrieking "Ears of Danger!" like Little Richard.

"Ears of danger! Whoooooooooooooo! Extreeeeeem!"

I do not think I could swear that this shed any light on the situation.

When I telephoned 7-Eleven's head office in Victoria, a full-grown woman told me in evident seriousness that the caricature I'd identified as a donkey in fact represented an excitement-addicted mule named, 'Raul'. She said that they'd chosen a mule because the product contained taurine.

"It kicks like a mule," she said.

"Oh, I see," I said, "because of the taurine in it, the slurpee kicks like this Spanish mule named Raul?"

"Peruvian," she said.

"Sorry?" I said.

"Raul comes from Peru," she said.

Somewhere 7-Eleven's advertising agency had convened a meeting and decided that Raul the Extreeeem Slurpee Mule comes from the Republic of Peru.

I asked if Raul had voted in the last Peruvian election, at which point she made me as a smartass and clammed up.

Jacket

2010-04-16T11:22:00.006+10:00

I hung this jacket on my clothesline in 2006 (photo below). Through that summer, the sun bleached it from black to grey. In autumn it faded to white at the high points, but you could still find some of the original black in the valleys of its folds.

Next spring a colony of weevils built a nest under one of the sleeves. But in summer, a competing colony of earwigs from the collar drove them from the jacket.

Since it could drain after each downpour, the jacket never grew any mould or moss, but by winter the cotton around the bottom began to fray. By that point, I estimate that it had absorbed around a kilolitre of rainwater.

During a cold snap the jacket froze, but its worst enemy remained the intense sun of summer and autumn. By the end of 2008 it looked like an old dog whose fur has gone white.

In dry spells, soot from the cars on North Road solidified in the crevasses of the corduroy. It made me think of a hobo blackened with train-smoke. Underneath it remained as white as Lee Marvin.

I continued to ruin the jacket through 2009. After the spider who ruled it during spring departed, a new colony of insects moved in for the summer. It has stood vacant ever since.

I estimate that over the four years, fifty megajoules of solar energy fell on it (about the amount of energy released by the explosion of twelve tons of TNT).

Last week, I brought it in and washed it:

http://www.sevenextraeyes.org/andy-social/jacket.jpg

To my surprise, it seems wearable. These show various friends of mine wearing it:

http://www.sevenextraeyes.org/andy-social/friendswearingjacket1.jpg,

http://www.sevenextraeyes.org/andy-social/friendswearingjacket2.jpg,

http://www.sevenextraeyes.org/andy-social/friendswearingjacket3.jpg

Ilia Tare

2010-04-15T09:41:00.000+10:00

Born in Golem, Albania in 1961, Tare studied astrophysics under the tutelage of Adam Kola at the University of Tirana.

In 1981, using the pseudonym 'Orion Mala', he began writing articles for the underground periodical Lëndë e Djegshme in which he argued that Leninism had debased the original aims of socialism.

In 1985, the Albanian Directorate of State Security imprisoned Tare for sedition. He remained in custody until the collapse of communism in 1991.

Tare completed his PhD at the Polytechnic University of Tirana in 1996. In 2007 he joined the Academy of Para-Chronology in his home municipality of Golem, where he remained until his death from inflammatory heart disease in 2024.

Diagram (ISC Yoko Ono)

2010-04-14T10:02:00.001+10:00

This shows the diagram for the ISC Yoko Ono:

http://www.sevenextraeyes.org/andy-social/yokoono.gif

ISC Yoko Ono

2010-04-13T14:55:00.018+10:00

Original licence: Ilia Tare, Akademia e Nderkronologjishtë
In service: 2016-

The ISC Yoko Ono remains in service only because of its relative unobtrusiveness on many twentieth and twenty-first century worldlines. It has little other merit. It uses a finicky jump control system; its low cargo capacity prevents the crew from bringing much equipment; it carries no buzzbot and only one message probe. Under the stresses of a mission, the systems it does carry have a tendency to malfunction. Worse, its jump battery uses a recalled design of fuel cell, which if ruptured may vent a small amount of an odorless gas known to induce temporary schizophrenia.

However, for missions where the crew can overcome its technological shortcomings, the Yoko Ono makes a fabulous surveillance vehicle. Few people surveilled by an ice cream truck will suspect anything (although they may come to buy ice cream). It can make multiple crawls through most neighbourhoods at slow speed without arousing disquiet.

The Yoko Ono's sensor station has an anachronous parachronic detector, a GPS receiver, quantum analyzer and sidereal chronolog. Other integral accessories include a flare launcher, public address system, encrypted radio, an irritable repairbot and a database of attractions held at the Time Tours Outtime Zoo in New York, which includes a foldout map of the new Phoenix enclosure.

Appearance:	Red and green striped ice cream truck
Mobility:	Wheeled minivan (manual transmission, maximum speed 150 km/h with full load, 0-100 km/h in 30 seconds, Handling -1, Stability Rating 4)
Jump capacity:	3000kg
Empty mass:	2000kg
Crew:	Jump station, Driver's seat, Medical station, Sensor station
Length:	4.0m (wheelbase: 2.3m)
Width:	1.9m
Height:	2.0m body; 3.2m to top of cone ornament
Interior volume:	8.0 m³
Sensors:	Parachronic detector, Global Positioning System (+3 to Navigation rolls), Quantum analyser, Sidereal chronolog, Headlights, Car mirrors, Space-bat detector
Manipulators:	None
Weapons:	Smoke dischargers, Super-adhesive sprayer
Communications:	One message drone, Flare launcher, Public address system, Encrypted radio (range 10km)
Power:	Internal combustion engine (TL7 transverse reciprocating engine, 100 litre fuel tank), Electrochemical fuel cell (uses a recalled design; if damaged, may vent a small amount of an odourless, colourless gas that can induce temporary schizophrenia)
Shielding:	Electrical shielding, Radiation shielding (with window shutters deployed)
Other systems:	Ejection seat (front passenger), Repairbot (marked with the official seal of the Kingdom of Ndongo), Security system (-4 to Lockpicking, Traps, Electronics Operation, and Computer Operation rolls to circumvent; encryption strength: complexity 9), Defibrillator, Database of attractions held at the Time Tours Outtime Zoo in New York (includes a foldout map of the new Phoenix enclosure), Winch (ST 25), Spare tire, Ice cream refrigerator (2.0 m³)
Projector rolls:	-2
Jump rolls:	-2
ST/HP:	75
HT:	9f
SM:	+4
DR:	30 (without shutters deployed, windows have DR 3)
Notes:	Chimes can play Greensleeves, Turkey in the Straw, The Entertainer or Whistle While You Work. Caught on film in the film Blade Runner on Frontiero-1.

Yoko Ono loadout

Besides crewmembers, the basic mission loadout for the Yoko Ono comprises:

popsicles and ice cream cones for the refrigerator
four portable first aid kits
one pair of boltcutters
three helmets with sculptured birds on top
three iron broadswords with points (inflict sw+1 cutting damage with a swing or thr+2 impaling damage with a thrust; see Basic Set Characters book p. 271 for details)
three pairs of assault boots
one novelty flashlight that projects the Infinity Patrol logo
two anoraks with stupendous hoods
six spare sparkplugs
two metres of nickel wire
one large smooth metal doorknob
four red and blue light blubs
three pairs of red/blue 3d-glasses

Booger and the Huntingdale Road hooker

2010-04-08T06:32:00.014+10:00

Clayton's households divide into two genera: proletarian families (and students) who accept Clayton's wonderful seediness and property-amassing twenty-first-century Babbitts who resent it.

Amongst the latter, Bill Pontikis stands out for his efforts to assemble Clayton's residents and businesses into a community. As one who has experienced Mr. Pontikis in person - sometimes at distances as little as five feet, I must conclude that rather than acting from any humanitarian motive, he simply wishes to enlarge the opportunities for commercial rapine. Nonetheless, the fact remains that unlike the majority of Clayton's other petty napoleons, Pontikis has shown himself willing to take a hand in civic life.

Pontikis serves as the president of Clayton's Boosters Club, the Clayton Traders' Association. Their membership embraces some of the zippiest, peppiest traders in the whole middle-outer south-eastern suburbs west of Springvale. Yet to their chagrin, Clayton's best known residents remain a horny, bicycle-riding wanderer named 'Booger' and the Huntingdale Road hooker.

A Facebook group devoted to Booger, 'Booger - A Clayton Icon', enjoys more than seven hundred members. Two groups devoted to the Huntingdale Road hooker, 'Huntingdale Road hooker' and 'The Clayton hooker', together claim a similar number. An intriguing crossover group, 'Booger and the Huntingdale Road hooker should get married', trails behind at two hundred and thirty.

Yet neither the newsletter of the Clayton Traders Association nor the website of the Monash City Council makes any mention of them.

It would cost Clayton little to erect a monument in their honour. Tony Vu 'Man Hairdresser' already owns the perfect location. Of late, Tony has started tying helium balloons to his sign, which go flat and drag around on the ground. Next to it, the council would have little trouble mounting a tasteful brass plaque that reads, 'Welcome to Clayton. Home of Booger and the Huntingdale Road hooker'.

Fairies

2010-04-04T06:48:00.004+10:00

This shows the trails of sparkles shed by four moving fairies. The first and third fairies shed bluish green sparkles; the second and fourth buff-coloured ones.

Each fairy and all the sparkles it sheds accelerate towards one of the other fairies with a constant magnitude of acceleration:

the first fairy and the sparkles it sheds accelerate towards the second fairy,
the second fairy and the sparkles it sheds accelerate towards the third fairy,
the third fairy and the sparkles it sheds accelerate towards the fourth fairy
and the fourth fairy and the sparkles it sheds accelerate towards the first fairy.

Each sparkle begins bright and fades through blacker and blacker hues until it vanishes.

http://www.sevenextraeyes.org/andy-social/fairies.jpg

I wear a Hawaiian shirt

2010-03-30T15:55:00.010+11:00

Any inquiry into human motives faces a substantial obstacle: the questions you use to ask someone about their motives sound just the same as the questions you'd use to accuse them of having no respectable motives.

This situation doesn't arise by accident. When you ask someone why they did something, you indicate that you can't already see the answer (save for in certain unusual circumstances, such as when you ask the question for the benefit of a third party). The thinking runs that perhaps you can't see the answer because you can't conceive of any respectable answer. By declaring, by implication, that perhaps you can conceive of no respectable motive for them to have done whatever they did, you accuse them of perhaps having no respectable motive for doing it.

Whether through this mechanism or the simple impertinence of turning up at someone's door to ask them questions in a Hawaiian shirt, the obdurate investigator of human motives risks ruffling a few feathers.

I like the ivy in my yard. It helps me to imagine the yard as a courtyard in some misty city on the moors where men conspire against the kings. But wasps like it even better. Lest they resolve to nest in it, I pare it back to a few adventurous wisps along the brickwork.

I live in unit 11 at number 52 North Road. In one of the units at number 50, the ivy stretches skyward in a ragged cylinder three metres high and more than a metre thick. From there it flows over the back fence into number 52 and cascades down either side of a decaying sheet of asbestos that divides my yard from unit 12.

In January, after trimming the ivy on my side, I went around to unit 12 with a pruning saw to encourage the new tenant to do the same.

He introduced himself as Chen. We exchanged a few banalities about differences between the weather here and in his home city of Beijing.

When I aired my concern about the ivy, Chen led me out to his backyard, where we hacked down a few strands of it. Then Chen borrowed the saw so he could finish the job. A few days later, he'd felled all of it.

Buoyed by my success, I strode round to number 50.

From its location relative to mine, the backyard with the ivy had to belong to one of the first few units. I knocked at unit 2 but nobody answered. I couldn't ring the buzzer because they'd locked the screen in front of it. They had a Neighborhood Watch emblem and two round stickers on the windows warning visitors that an alarm system protected the premises. This felt like a bad sign.

Most of us see it as part of the spirit of compassion not to wall ourselves off from the parts of our society where misfortunes take place. Instead we try to help. However where one sees a man obsessed with security, one may fear that his obsession stems from the antithetical inclination to separate himself from wider society instead of helping out. Will he welcome me and ask how he can help out or will he shout from his parapet for me to move on?

When I tried unit 3, two men came to the door in underpants and T-shirts. Perhaps this accounted for the locked screen next door. I introduced myself and asked if they had a mass of ivy in their backyard. The man in front said he didn't know. The other man went back to playing a racing-car game on a gargantuan television near the door.

"What about you, sir, with the game controller," I said, "do you know if you have ivy in the backyard?"

"No," he said, "I also don't know."

"We don't live here," said the man in front.

"Oh, I see," I said, "has the person who lives here gone out?"

"Yes," he said.

Perhaps he'd gone out to launder all their pants.

"Do you know when the person will come back?"

"No," he said.

At that point the woman in unit 2 arrived home. She looked about forty, had dark skin and wore her hair up in a bouffant. I introduced myself as her neighbor, summarised my concerns about wasps and ivy and asked if she had the yard with the tower of ivy in it.

"No," she said, "ours only has a little."

She unlocked both doors, skipped in and locked both of them again from the inside.

The underpants men let me take a look around their yard. They didn't have it. I could see it towering up to the heavens in unit 2's yard. The bouffant lady tricked me.

When I knocked at her door again, she wouldn't open it. Instead she shouted something I couldn't make out through the door. I shouted back that an opportunity had arisen for us to bond as neighbours and work together. She didn't answer. When I knocked again two minutes later, she didn't even try to shout through the door.

I obtained the name of the realtor who handled the units form the occupant in unit 1. By the time I got in touch with them, wasps had built a flourishing hive in the ivy. Anytime from midmorning to twilight you could see fifty or more wasps buzzing around it.

The realtor telephoned the landlord. When I called back, the realtor said the landlord had asked if the queen wasp might just have come by to inspect the ivy while looking around for a place to settle.

I pictured an eager young wasp with a clipboard showing the queen around the property. I could only imagine that somewhere along the chain of relays between me and the landlord one of the intermediaries had added something about a queen wasp drifting past the area.

After another fortnight of relaying messages back and forth, somebody chopped down the ivy.

Why had the bouffant lady declined to answer the door? I don't think I look frightening, but in the story the monster never does. When the first people flee, he wonders what they see. Him? To what barbarous lineage of creatures must he then belong?

He needs to understand his place in the world, so he approaches a second group of people. When they also flee, he fears the worst. At last, he looks into a mirror or the surface of a pond and sees Satan looking back at him.

When I look in the mirror, I see a baby-faced man in a Hawaiian shirt.

Groping through the grey mass zetetic, I arrived back at number 50. This time she opened the door. She looked apprehensive. I revealed that I'd come on a quest to understand the motives of my fellow men. Could she tell me why she wouldn't answer the door last time?

"What," I asked, "can win us more honor as truth seekers than to assist each other in the quest for enlightenment?"

"I had something in the oven," she said.

"I fretted that I might've scared you somehow," I said.

I opted not to explain about the monster.

"They sawed all the vines down," she said.

"I hope I don't look frightening," I said, "but, come, help me to understand my place in the world. I know the duty you must feel to the spirit of enquiry."

She said she needed to get her husband and shut the door.

Her husband never came to the door, though after a couple of minutes he came to the window and peeked at me through the curtains. When after fifteen minutes no cops had arrived, I shuffled home.

Last Sunday, I strolled back to visit them again just before noontime. The husband came to the door in underwear and a tattered wrestling shirt. I may've overestimated how many men wear pants at home.

One of his nipples protruded through a hole in the shirt. He looked me in the eyes and started scratching his testicles. He scratched with such ardour that the whole right side of his body shook. I waited a few seconds for him to finish, but he kept right on scratching so I introduced myself and ran over the prior conversations I'd had with his wife.

I reassured him that I wouldn't bother either of them again. I explained my hope that I resided in a universe where a man could understand why his fellow men did things. He nodded and kept scratching at his groin.

I retold the parable with the monster. I wondered, did his scratching become more frantic as the story moved to its moments of tension? At other points, he'd pause for a few heartbeats and then resume at a slower pace.

I explained that I hoped to understand what her reaction implied about my place in society. Did he know why she'd decided not to come to the door?

He gave his groin a last, thoughtful scratch.

"You frightened her," he said, "because you caught her at home by herself. Then later we both felt too embarrassed about it to discuss it with you."

Majestic

2010-03-18T03:12:00.012+11:00

Halfway through the book of Exodus, God proclaims to Moses the ordinances governing different kinds of ox gorings¹. For example,

"And if one man's ox gores another man's ox so it dies; then they shall sell the live ox and divide the money; and the dead ox also they shall divide."²

It amazes one how relevant that remains today.

On the other hand, if an ox gores a person, one must stone the ox to death. God doesn't outline the modus operandi, but one suspects that after an advertising campaign to sell the event, a crowd surrounds the ox and hurls stones it at for ten minutes as it lumbers around between them.

Did a lot of this sort of thing go on? God specifies the exact amount of silver that the owner of an ox must transfer to the owner of a servant if the former gores the latter³.

Footnotes:

Exodus 21:28-36
Exodus 21:35, Lamsa Bible
Thirty shekels. Exodus 21:32

Tradeoffs (for Brett)

2010-03-15T18:01:00.007+11:00

When inferior food lies nearby, how far will ants walk to get food they prefer?

To answer this question, a team at Monash University's Department of Animal Behaviour¹ place two feeders within the exploration range of a colony of ants. Both contain solutions of sugar, water and gluten, but to dissuade ants from using the nearby feeder they add citronella oil (a common ingredient in insect repellents²).

All day long, tireless worker ants collect syrup from the nearby feeder and share it throughout the hive.

But the citronella proves lethal. Not a single ant escapes. When the experimenters come in the next day, it looks like the Somme.

Endnotes:

Now within the School of Biological Sciences.
Registered for "human applications" to repel gnats and mosquitoes in 1948 by the United States Environmental Protection Agency. Depending on the plant of origin, for acute oral toxicity the median lethal dose in laboratory animals equals 4380 or 5000mg/kg. The US EPA's "Reregistration Eligibility Decisions" factsheet for oil of citronella describes it as "biochemical pesticide which has a non-toxic mode of action". See R.E.D. Facts: Oil of Citronella (United States Environmental Protection Agency; Protection, Pesticides and Toxic Substances, 1997)

Elastic time and money

2010-03-08T09:56:00.001+11:00

Hilary shared an apartment, and thus rent, bills and housekeeping, with Sophie. Like Hilary and I, Sophie supported herself through a mixture of Austudy and various atrocious part-time jobs. After a brief stint working for a telephone sex line, she found her niche as a telephone psychic.

An ineradicable optimism endeared Sophie to you as a friend, but it made her an appalling housemate. It amounted to the faith that when you found yourself without the time or money to do something, you could do it anyway.

At first, we assumed that she just thought fate would provide for her, but her faith proved more profound. As she explained to Hilary one day, Sophie believed in the elasticity of time and money. She had inflated simple financial irresponsibility into a metaphysical scheme in which man's will could bend time or arithmetic. If you needed money for something, such as your half of the rent, but didn't have all of it, you could make the portion you had stretch to cover it.

In large part, she put this theory into practice through her chequebook. When the rent fell due and she found that she only had half of it, she would write a cheque for the full amount anyway. She reasoned that she would have a few days before they deposited the cheque and then a few more days before it cleared to get the rest of the money into the account somehow. If possible, she would take the cheque in late on a Friday to buy herself extra time. When a few days later no miracle had enlarged the account balance and the cheque bounced, they would become just one more foxhound in the pack of involuntary creditors who hounded her with debt collectors.

Diagram (ISC Tom Baker)

2010-03-06T05:10:00.000+11:00

This shows the diagram for the ISC Tom Baker:

http://www.sevenextraeyes.org/andy-social/tombaker.gif

ISC Tom Baker

2010-03-05T10:32:00.009+11:00

Original licence: Paralabs Tianjin
In service: 2027-

The design for the ISC Tom Baker comes from an enclosed five-man bicycle exhibited at the 2025 Interworld Fair in Shanghai. It features cutting-edge sensory and communications systems, low weight and superb protection.

The Tom Baker has the strongest electronic security of any conveyor in current service. Paralabs claim that cracking the access codes would take more than twenty years using current technology.

Crewmembers pedal the bicycle. Under ideal conditions it can reach a top speed on level ground of fifty-five kilometres an hour or more. Over a distance of three kilometres, a Chinese athletic team in Hubei province achieved an average speed of forty-five kilometres an hour.

The Tom Baker carries a "rescue embobulator" for calamity work. At a distance of up to twenty meters, it can seal a man-sized target into a buoyant, flexible bubble of armored plastic. Other built-in gadgetry includes a slipspray projector, chemical sniffer, infrared communicator, parachronic detector, quantum analyser, laser rangefinder, radar jammer, radiation and mine detectors, a buzzbot and a hibernation chamber using superior-to-homeline technology from Amphigory-1.

Appearance:	Enclosed five-man bicycle
Mobility:	Velomobile (maximum speed equals half the combined Move of the riders, Handling +0, Stability Rating 3)
Jump capacity:	1000kg
Empty mass:	400kg
Crew:	Jump station, Buzzbot monitor station
Length:	9.5m
Width:	1.0m
Height:	1.4m
Interior volume:	6.7 m³
Sensors:	Hardened parachronic detector (+3 HT vs electrical shock), Chemical sniffer, Quantum analyser, Laser rangefinder, Sidereal chronolog, Radiation detector, Mine detector, Bicycle mirrors, Headlight
Manipulators:	None
Weapons:	Slipspray projector (carries enough spray to cover 30 m²)
Communications:	Encrypted long-range radio (range 100km), Long-range infrared communicator (range 500m), Bell
Power:	Electrochemical fuel cell, Solar power array
Shielding:	Electrical shielding
Other systems:	Buzzbot, Security system (-6 to Lockpicking, Traps, Electronics Operation, and Computer Operation rolls to circumvent; encryption strength: complexity 11), Radar jammer (TL9), Defibrillator, Hibernation chamber (TL8+1, marked "property of Pernambuco Arcology, do not remove"), Fire extinguisher, Rescue enbobulator (TL7+2), Automatic tortilla maker, Skate attachments for ice riding, Bicycling tools and spare parts
Projector rolls:	+1
Jump rolls:	+1
ST/HP:	50†
HT:	12
SM:	+4
DR:	60 vs piercing, cutting and burning; 30 vs all other damage types
Notes:

Tom Baker loadout

Besides crewmembers, the basic mission payload for the Tom Baker comprises:

three doses of morphine
three bandage sprays
one combat helmet and visor
one five-hundred gram brick of TL8 demolition explosive
one echo microphone with a 'rap' feature
twelve candles
one Enchiridion brand mobile phone
one flask of crickets
one deluxe-model toaster
three extending batons

Three tone tan

2010-03-01T06:22:00.013+11:00

In his remarkable essay, The Simple Art of Murder¹, Chandler points out that, in the real world, using elaborate means to commit a murder, disguise one or to fabricate an alibi will only serve to incriminate the perpetrator. It gives a methodical police force too much to work with. Instead (if I comprehend Chandler's meaning), just bludgeon the victim with some commonplace object found near the scene of the crime (like a filing cabinet) and when the police ask for your alibi, tell them to go fuck themselves.

One of the pleasures of my life comes from watching Robert Culp make the preparations for the murder at the start of a week's Columbo. It gives me the same innocent pleasure as destroying bubble wrap or pronouncing the name 'Hubert Sumlin'. I imagine Columbo in court, trying to explain to the jury about the three slow wristwatches, the lady hidden in the cake and the moment when all four windows lined up with the lake.

Double Exposure opens on Culp retrieving a calibre converter from the lamp in his office. He attaches it to a pistol and locks the pistol into a display case on the wall. Next, we watch him dial the thermostat in his building up to eighty-five degrees. Then, in the projectionist's booth, we watch him splice a photograph of a glass of iced tea into a reel of film. In the same room, he disables one of the building's three closed-circuit TV monitors.

Back in his office, we wait while he dials the telephone. A middle-aged woman answers. In an assumed voice he tells her that her husband has cheated on her.

The philandering victim arrives with four other businessmen. They've come to preview Culp's latest instructional movie. Every one of them wears a tan suit.

To parch the victim's throat, Culp feeds him salted beluga caviar before the movie.

When the lights go down in the picture room, Culp uses the tape of his voice to fabricate his alibi. He slips back to his office and retrieves the handgun with its calibre converter from the display case. When at last the subliminal iced tea, heat and caviar send the victim out to the water fountain, Culp shoots him, returns the calibre converter to its lamp, locks the handgun in its display case and returns to the picture room just in time to appear before the others when the lights come up.

We love the show for the magnetism of its eponymous hero. See him hunched forward in that tan raincoat over a darker tan jacket, his shirt a third, yet distinguishable shade of tan.

None of us can help but find the murders preposterous.

Footnote:

Chandler, Raymond, The Simple Art of Murder (Houghton Mifflin, 1950).

Cocoa puff demon

2010-02-26T01:02:00.006+11:00

This shows the front panel from a box of You'll Love Coles brand cocoa puffs:

http://www.sevenextraeyes.org/andy-social/cocoademon.jpg

Above the words, 'serving suggestion', it shows a blue demon with flipper hands standing much too close to a worried-looking six-year-old. It gives me nightmares. I want to yell for it to get away from that child.

The creature looks like a homemade doll they discover in the serial killer's house. Its tiny legs support a grotesque leaning body whose proportions mock earthborn life. What can the manager have thought when this came back from the art department?

Bandwagon

2010-02-20T17:31:00.012+11:00

When Labor spun open its home insulation subsidy last February, a thousand insulation dingoes all across the country started fighting to get their muzzles under the spigot.

When the first one phoned, I explained that I already had grey insulating powder in the crawlspace. When their tradesman came, he found I had too much grey insulating powder to qualify for the subsidy.

I explained all this to the second insulation company, but they said they'd send a man anyway. Their man confirmed the verdict. He explained that I didn't qualify because the insulating powder rose up higher than the tops of the joists.

When I told the third insulation company that two others had already found that I didn't qualify, they said they'd send an installation team. I told them that insulating powder rose up higher than the tops of the joists. They said that the team would have four men. I asked why they thought it worthwhile to send four men just on the off chance that both previous insulators had made a mistake. They said that it wouldn't cost me anything.

At first, the team drove to the wrong end of North Road. They phoned to ask how close I lived to the beach. The company must've given them the wrong address.

Ten minutes later, they phoned to ask if I lived near a Red Rooster. I said no, but ten minutes after that they phoned to ask which Red Rooster I lived near.

It took another three phone calls to get them to my apartment. When they arrived, they looked like a hunting party who had lost their fight with the elk. They had ripped-up clothes and one of them had a scab that ran from the bridge of his nose up to his forehead.

I told them that two other tradesmen had both determined that I didn't qualify for the subsidy and that insulating powder in my crawlspace rose up higher than the joists. Their headman looked inside the crawlspace and decided that he wanted the money.

"No worries," he said, "we'll just put the batts on top of it."

By recording the roof's area as twice its actual size and then authorising a rebate to bring the cost back to $1200, they billed the government for the maximum possible amount.

This shows part of the surveyor's certificate for the strata plan:

http://www.sevenextraeyes.org/andy-social/siteplan.jpg

It shows an area of about seventy-five square meters (or eight squares).

This shows the invoice the installers left me:

http://www.sevenextraeyes.org/andy-social/receipt.jpg

It records the area as one-hundred and thirty square meters (or fourteen squares). Also, the two items add up to fifty-eight dollars more than the total.

Phases

2010-02-14T01:16:00.005+11:00

This shows a moon of my face that moves through different phases to match my sleeping. Its fullness indicates (in a rough way) how much my waking hours overlap with workday Victorian waking hours.

http://sevenextraeyes.org:12001/show

Coen moment

2010-02-12T02:30:00.003+11:00

From my backyard in the middle of the night, I can see the cars on North Road whipping past gum trees while five other backyards sleep in silence. In one of them, my neighbour Chen has two identical woollen yellow sweaters drying on his clothesline. Chen has spaced them out so they fill the space, leaving a gap to either side the same width as the space between them. They have crisp black V-necks and no creases or sun bleaching.

Seeing them floating there in a sliver of lamplight in the middle of the night makes you feel like you live in a Coen brothers film. You look at them askance for a second and go back to your thoughts, realising that your neighbours will always remain incomprehensible to you.

Tomorrow instead of bringing them in, I hope that Chen will add a third yellow sweater.

Spout

2010-02-11T10:05:00.012+11:00

This shows the pathways of droplets discharged by a moving spout.

The spout targets a point near the centre of the image. It starts out with a velocity not parallel to its displacement from that point and then accelerates towards it with constant magnitude of acceleration. Meanwhile, it discharges droplets in the opposite direction to its velocity.

All of the droplets move at the same speed and darken as they move.

http://www.sevenextraeyes.org/andy-social/spout.jpg

Nerds fable

2010-02-07T18:44:00.002+11:00

The basic nerd's fable amounts to the conceit that the majority of the populace qualify as fools. In many versions, it includes the corollary that one may blame most of society's ills on their foolishness.

Since it provides a pretext for haughtiness as well as grounds to shirk responsibility for society's faults, a nerd who manages to remain undaunted by its juvenileness may still turn to it for comfort long after he has given up on Santa Claus, Jesus or the Easter Bunny.

Domain Tunnel

2010-02-06T01:17:00.009+11:00

When the Domain Tunnel opened in 2000, the state government set a temporary sixty kilometre an hour speed limit. Their caution seems prudent. Who knows how much the construction firm might've abridged basic safety to cut costs. But the explanation they proffered insulted all of us. They explained that Victorian motorists needed time to get used to driving through a tunnel. As if they thought that, finding no sky above our heads, we might flip out and slam on the brakes in traffic.

For weeks, they had run an advertising campaign instructing us just to drive like normal in the tunnel. Don't get out of your car or try to turn around.

In how much contempt must they hold us if they think we need help to grasp the concept of a tunnel? They must see the Victorian motorist as a creature of mere impulse. Like a monkey. Imagine the ad with the subtext explicit:

"Like all lesser peoples, the Victorian does not assess or plan. He reacts. Faced with any new experience, even one as humdrum as driving through a tunnel, he may panic. He may do something ridiculous, like swerving into the wall for no reason.

His ignorance leaves him vulnerable to fits of hysteria. "Who has blotted out the sun!" he may scream. He may halt in the midst of traffic and run out of his car."

But I no longer feel sure that we can prove them wrong, so I pose this as a genuine question: does it ask too much to hope they might treat us with less contempt?

Wheelie bins

2010-02-01T15:54:00.002+11:00

In my area, the city council empties the rubbish bins once a week. We wheel them out to the road; the City of Monash empties them; we wheel them back to our houses and spend the rest of the week filling them up with hotdog packets. Then we repeat the cycle.

My neighbors paint their apartment numbers on their bins. That way they can make sure that each week they wheel out the same bin that they wheeled out the previous week. They have a history with their rubbish bin.

Since I can't bring myself to feel attached to the space I use to throw out vegetable peels each week, I just grab the closest bin without a number on it. Last year, I grabbed the one marked '2' by mistake.

Instead of using one of the unmarked bins for the week, the woman in number 2 started asking around the apartment block to see if anybody knew where it'd gone. When nobody did, she phoned the police. Instead of asking her to throw her kitchen scraps into an unmarked bin for the week, the police referred her to the city council.

The city council delivered a new bin. I imagined them setting it down next to the other spare unmarked bin. After a week of use, it would take a forensic examination to distinguish the two.

Adventure possibilities (ISC Beefheart)

2010-01-31T16:50:00.005+11:00

Kreutzer's outrage and megalomania makes him a fun nemesis. After twenty-eight years on Prophet-4, Kreutzer has come to see himself as the Christian Messiah. When the Rapture comes, he'll return to homeline to scatter the unrighteous and establish his kingdom on Earth. Patrolmen who stumble on to Prophet-4 may give him the conveyor to do it.

Graphic (Prophet-4)

2010-01-30T13:07:00.004+11:00

This shows the graphic for Prophet-4:

http://www.sevenextraeyes.org/andy-social/prophet.jpg

Prophet-4, 999

2010-01-29T08:22:00.007+11:00

Current Affairs
With Pope Gregory V dying, Holy Roman Emperor Otto III seals the Sacred Palace. As Christendom awaits the end of the world, rival Cardinals plot their ascendency to the papacy.

Divergence Point
974: A Christian prophet in Rome introduces toothbrushes, proper sanitation and a form of the underarm deodorant.

Major Civilisations
Western (bipolar), Chinese (empire), Islamic (empire with rivals)

Great Powers
Holy Roman Empire (feudal dictatorship, CR5), Byzantine Empire (dictatorship, CR5), Song China (dictatorship, CR5), Fatimid Caliphate (dictatorship, CR4), Kievan Rus' (dictatorship, CR5), Magyar (clan/tribal, CR4), Khazar khagnate (dictatorship, CR6), Croatian Kingdom (dictatorship, CR6)

Worldline Data
TL: 3
Mana Level: No mana
Quantum: 7
Infinity Class: Z1
Centrum Zone: Yellow

974: A Christian prophet in Rome introduces toothbrushes, proper sanitation and a form of the underarm deodorant.

975: Duke Mieszko I of Poland brushes his teeth before the royal court of Poznań, beginning the Christianisation of Poland.

976: Magyar horsemen begin a series of raids into Europe, which will last until the current day.

977: Avalanches across the Alps burry thousands.

978: The Bulgars turn their raiding parties northwards, striking as far north as Carinthia.

979: A decade-long famine in Lotharingia leads to widespread cannibalism.

980: Viking raiders first enter France.

981: The Loire River floods, submerging Tours, Angers and Orléans.

984: Prophet-4 shifts from Quantum 5 to Quantum 6; impetus unknown.

985: Duke Henry of Bavaria abducts the infant heir to the Holy Roman Empire, beginning ten years of civil war.

986: The airburst of a meteorite over Lorrain fells over a million trees, killing thousands.

987: Prophet-4 shifts to Quantum 7; impetus unknown.

988: Saracens sack Augsburg.

989: The appearance of Hailey's Comet causes hysteria throughout Europe.

991: Unprecedented hailstorms destroy three-quarters of the farmland in Pomerania.

992: The crowning of Holy Roman Emperor Otto III triggers riots throughout the empire.

Rudolf Kreutzer

2010-01-28T09:22:00.004+11:00

Born: 1976, Archduchy of Austria, Gödel-2
Missing: 1999-

After the childhood loss of his mother, Rudolf Kreutzer came under the guardianship of his maternal aunt, a post-humanist preacher ennobled by the Carpathian empress. In homeline-year 1992, Rudolf rewarded her benefaction by graduating first in his class from the Transhumanist Gymnasium in Vienna. In 1993, he agreed to undergo a radical neurological procedure called the Keeve Process, which fused his cerebral hemispheres by filling the longitudinal fissure with a mesh of neural fibre. It left him with extraordinary powers of visualisation, which he described as his ' Lidless 'I' '.

In 1995, Infinity founder Paul Van Zandt returned from an experimental trip to Gödel-2 with the ingenious young Kreutzer in tow. Later that year, one of the two men invented the parachronic projector, allowing Van Zandt to project his embryonic conveyors to other quanta. Which of the two remains a topic of debate. According to official sources, Van Zandt invented the projector, though Kreutzer assisted him with some of the calculations. By Kreutzer's account, Kreutzer instead did the main work, receiving only bureaucratic supervision from Van Zandt.

In 1999, Kreutzer accused Van Zandt of stealing credit for the projector and plagiarising the theoretical work that led to its development. The courts resolved the matter in favour of Van Zandt. In an interview in late 1999, a hysterical Kreutzer compared his 'persecution' by Infinity Unlimited to the crucifixion of Jesus Christ by Rome.

Three weeks later, Kreutzer broke into an Infinity research facility in Vancouver to steal several pieces of experimental machinery, including the prototype of a miniature conveyor (later licensed as the ISC Aldous Huxley). Facing arrest, Kreutzer tried to flee offworld in the prototype.

As it started to jump, the prototype shorted out. It remained on homeline, but Kreutzer vanished into the ether. No homeline agency has found a trace of him since. Infinity presume him dead. Even if the malfunctioning conveyor somehow transported him to a habitable worldline, its failure to follow would've left him marooned.

Diagram (ISC Beefheart)

2010-01-25T15:05:00.003+11:00

This shows the diagram for the ISC Beefheart:

http://www.sevenextraeyes.org/andy-social/diagbeefheart.gif

ISC Beefheart

2010-01-24T01:40:00.005+11:00

Original licence: Rudolf Kreutzer, Van Zandt Foundation
In service: 2000-

On worlds where the discovery of electromagnetism unlocked the secret of sorcery, the ISC Beefheart provides the essential instrument of politics: a Theremin-controlled zeppelin suspending a giant loudspeaker.

Without a zeppelin of his own, a sorcerer cannot hope to reign over more than a tiny estate. The zeppelin gives him the advantages of height, reach and opportunity. With it and a handful of apprentices, a powerful sorcerer can control a fiefdom as large as Ireland.

A skilled thereminist can maneuver the Beefheart with the agility of a much smaller craft. On mana worldlines, he can throw spells through the Theremin.

The Beefheart uses diesel engines to drive its props and power the loudspeaker. The Theremin controls the angles of the tailfins and the speeds of two reversible manoeuvring fans used to revolve the zeppelin around its lengthwise axis.

The Beefheart carries two message drones. Its sensor console has a parachronic detector, quantum analyzer and sidereal chronolog.

At the moment, the Beefheart boasts a campaign mural for the electoral campaign to elect "Archmage Mowinckel".

Appearance:	Theremin-controlled zeppelin suspending a giant loudspeaker
Mobility:	Airship (maximum take-off mass 7500kg using helium, 8100kg using hydrogen; maximum speed 80km/h with the loudspeaker switched off, 50km/h with it switched on; range 5000km; Handling -3, Stability Rating 3)
Jump capacity:	7400kg
Empty mass:	6400kg (5400kg with loudspeaker and its generator detached)
Crew:	Jump station, Wizard's platform (external), Backup wizard's platform near the tailfin (external), Alchemist's station
Length:	52.0m
Width:	13.0m
Height:	21.3m with loudspeaker rotated behind the gondola; 30.1m with loudspeaker deployed
Interior volume:	6000 m³ envelope
Sensors:	Parachronic detector, Quantum analyser, Sidereal chronolog
Manipulators:	None (wizard may cast manipulation spells through the Theremin, see Other systems)
Weapons:	None (wizard may cast attack spells through the Theremin, see Other systems)
Communications:	Loudspeaker (converts max 100,000 watts of electrical power at 10% efficiency to 10,000 watts of sound power: 100 decibels (re 1 picowatt) at 1km, 80 decibels at 10km, 60 decibels at 100km), Two message drones
Power:	Diesel engines (TL6), Wind turbine, Backup electrical motor
Shielding:	Envelope uses fireproofed canvas
Other systems:	Enchanted Theremin (For each spell he tries to cast through the Theremin, the caster first rolls against Musical Instrument (Theremin). If he succeeds, he multiplies the maximum range and the volume of the area of effect of the spell by 10 and adds twice the margin of success to his Skill Roll with that spell (which may also reduce the spell's energy cost). The loudspeaker must play at full volume for the enchantment to function at full effect. At lower volumes, reduce the effect in proportion to the volume.)
Projector rolls:	-1
Jump rolls:	-1
ST/HP:	100
HT:	10
SM:	+9
DR:	1 (cabin and loudspeaker have dr 5)
Notes:	Painted with a campaign mural for the electoral campaign to elect "Archmage Mowinckel"

Beefheart loadout

Besides crewmembers, the basic mission payload for the Beefheart comprises:

two compasses
two five-liter canisters of pressurised oxygen
one container of ball bearings
two cathode ray oscilloscopes
one jar of antibiotic pills
two armoured cuirasses
twelve packets of dehydrated soup
two cartons of Silk Cut brand cigarettes
one book of matches from the Mystic Lake casino in Minnesota

Farmville

2010-01-23T03:26:00.003+11:00

This shows a farm in Zynga's Farmville that uses hay bails to reproduce Salvatore Dali's The Persistence of Memory:

http://apps.facebook.com/onthefarm/index.php?ref=bookmark&fb_page_id=102452128776

I'd like to rearrange the bails into a new painting. Can anybody suggest one they'd like to see?

Dreams

2010-01-18T21:19:00.005+11:00

Watching the Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus feels like hearing somebody recount their dream. Both bore you for the same reason: because anything can happen at any moment, there exists no suspense. We feel no anxiety when thugs chase the hero, since at any moment the sky may spit asunder and disgorge platoons of patchwork pharaohs or motorcycle-riding crayfish to rescue him. The ground beneath the pursuers' feet may turn to treacle. The wind may blow in an opaline mist of bumblebees in frockcoats that halts everybody in their tracks. Even as they herd him to the edge of a precipice, we know that a flying teacup may appear to whisk him out of their reach.

Many of the backgrounds look terrific. They stun us with their detail and originality. The wide angle distortion makes them look like the landscape of a dream. As backgrounds, they spellbind us. But the cavalcade of tedious characters carping in front of them robs them of their mystery. If Gilliam had published them in a book of images, instead of jumbling them together into a film, he would've produced a fascinating book.

Carnegie valet

2010-01-14T18:20:00.003+11:00

When I pulled up outside Avi's, a man ran out of his apartment to watch me park. He wore a singlet tucked into a pair of yellow slacks. He had his hands up. While I reversed in, he hurled anxious glances back and forth between the front and back of my car.

This makes it harder to park.

Had he kept this up all day? I presume that at a recent point somebody had backed into his car while parking here. Did he now run out every time anyone parked nearby?

When I try to put myself in his shoes, I can't think of any reason to dash out ten times a day to distract parking vehicles.

The afternoon finds you home tucking your singlet into your yellow pants. Staring out at a section of road of no possible interest, you see a car pull up: the same broad division of automobile that hit your car last week. That makes the eleventh one today.

"For pity's sake," you think, "another car! Why do they keep parking in that unoccupied space in front of my car?"

But here imagination fails me. Why do you run out again to distract the driver?

Triffid

2010-01-11T13:32:00.002+11:00

This plant sprouted up in my garden:

http://www.sevenextraeyes.org/andy-social/triffid.jpg

Can anybody identify it?

Hollows

2010-01-07T18:57:00.006+11:00

When he closes his eyes, Damien Moore apprehends a cavity behind the blackness. It makes one think of a savage and marvellous god. Behind the space behind the darkness lives Damien Moore.

Damien even receives a sense of this unfathomable region's extent. It feels wide enough to hold a novel, but not a phonebook.

To my astonishment, Michael reports that he also apprehends such a cavity. Who else has the same sense? Could it arise, in some of us, out of some quirk in the human proprioceptive system?

Salesmanship

2010-01-01T06:40:00.010+11:00

Timeworn novels and films have left many of us with the rather outdated image of the door-to-door salesperson as a fast-talking cracker in a suit carrying a vacuum cleaner. "Pardon me, madam. I've come from Suction King to demonstrate the unmatched effectiveness of our affordable new Super-Vac, which retails for just 29.99".

In contrast, the solemn modern energy vendor turns up to your door in shirtsleeves. Sometimes he has a speechless trainee with him who just watches as he runs through his routine. He never looks older than twenty-five. More often than not, he confers the impression of having held the job himself for less than a month. He seems uneasy. You'd swap over to his syndicate out of simple sympathy, but he opens his spiel by telling you that he's come because they've discovered that your energy retailer overcharges you for electricity. As if they'd detected an emergency up at Electricity Headquarters and dispatched him to respond to it. "My God, a household in Clayton overpays for its electricity. Send our best man at once."

If you interrupt to ask if he wants to sell you an energy plan, he may even deny it. What does he get from so oblique an approach?

Kerfuffle

2009-12-26T00:29:00.004+11:00

A wearisome ancient practice requires the journalist to begin his description of any country or region by describing it as "a land of contradictions".

The charitable view sees this as the journalist's admission that he hasn't comprehended his subject. That he views the disparate facets he'll go on to describe as contradictions, comprehending too little about the country or region to harmonise them.

An uncharitable alternative might take it to show that the journalist holds his reader in such contempt as to suppose him to imagine the region as a monoculture of television caricatures.

Choose a country at random. Now go to Google and search for your country and "land of contradiction".

Among print publications, one finds lands of contradiction such as,

China ("A land of contradictions", The Guardian, Xinran, March 12, 2004),
Australia (The Land of the Kangaroo, Thomas Knox, 2008),
Denmark ("Denmark: land of contradictions", Modern Power Systems, Benjamin Tait, May, 1999),
Wales (Regional Development in the 1990s: The British Isles in Transition, Peter Townrow and Ron Martin (editors), 2002),
Turkey ("Talking in Turkey: Dissent in a Land of Contradictions", New York Times, Stephen Kinzer, November 29, 1997),
Germany (God's Smuggler, Brother Andrew, Elizabeth Sherrill, John Sherrill, 2001),
Italy ("Delving into the Italian psyche", The Sunday Times, Michael Foley, June 25, 2006)
Florida (Road Biking Florida: A Guide to the Greatest Bike Rides in Florida, Rick Sapp, 2008),
Myanmar ("Land of contradictions", The Asian Wall Street Journal, Barry Wain, 1999),
Virginia (The Enduring Vision: A History of the American People, Paul Boyer et al, 2009),
Poland ("A Land of Contradictions", San Francisco Chronicle, Les Adler, February 22, 1987),
Ancient Greece (The Penguin Historical Atlas of Ancient Greece, Robert Morkot, 1997),
the West Bank ("Growth in the Palestinian Land of Contradictions", Palestine Monitor, Jonathan Cook, September 1, 2008),
South Korea (Frommer's South Korea, Celica Hae-Jin Lee, 2008),
Bolivia ("In the land of contradiction", The Telegram, Martin Lobigs, January 16, 2008),
the Dungeons and Dragons country of "Vilhon Reach", (Player's Guide to Faerun, Richard Baker, 2004),
Egypt (Spectacular Egypt, Mohamed El-Dakhakhny (editor), 2002),
Lebanon ("Dispatches from the Rubble", New York Times, Stewart Kellerman, July 17, 1998),
Sicily (Sweet Honey, Bitter Lemons: Travels in Sicily on a Vespa, Matthew Fort, 2009),
Morocco (Surfing Europe, Chris Nelson, Demi Taylor, 2008),
Pakistan ("Land of contradictions", The News International, Ahmad Rafay Alam, December 22, 2009),
Ireland (On Celtic Tides: One Man's Journey Around Ireland by Sea Kayak, Chris Duff, 200),
the Balkans (Imagining the Balkans, Maria Todorova, 2009)
and Japan ("A land of contradictions; less-visited islands of Japan undrape mix of traditional, modern ways", The Washington Times, Mary Calvert, February 25, 2006).

From online magazines and blogs one can add,

South Central Idaho ("South Central Idaho", Go Northwest, December 3, 2009),
Cuba ("IT in the Land of Salsa, Rum & Fidel", Revista Inter Forum, Timothy Ashby, July 29, 2001),
Alaska ("Alaska: Land of Contradictions", Miller-McCone Online Magazine, Lee Drutman, October 2, 2008),
Venezuela ("Contradictions and Division on Election Eve", Michael Fox, Global Exchange, December 3, 2006),
Luxembourg ("Luxembourg, Land of Contradiction", Epions.com, lordlucan, November 12, 2001),
Laos ("Two Victims of the Vietnam War - Laos: Land of Contradictions", World and I)
Israel ("Israel at 60 - a land of contradictions", World Blog, Martin Fletcher, May 7, 2008)
Iceland ("Iceland, Land of Contradiction", Weblog, May 18, 2008),
India ("India, A Land of Contradictions", Weblog, Gireesh George (thrust), February 21, 2007)
and Thailand ("The Land of Contradictions: Dispatches from Thailand", EdgeWise Magazine Travel Blog)

A parallel practice requires the biographer or eulogist to admit his incomprehension through the phrase "a man of contradictions". One finds men of contradiction such as,

Joseph Stalin (Stalin: man of contradiction, Kenneth Cameron, 1987),
James Dean ("James Dean, a man of contradictions", The Age, September 30, 2005),
John Calvin ("Man of Contradictions, Shaper of Modernity", New York Times, Peter Steinfels, July 3, 2009),
pirate "Black Bart" Roberts ('Pirate Encyclopedia: John Bartholomew "Black Bart" Roberts', Age of Pirates, 2006),
rampage killer Nidal Hasan ("Fort Hood shooting suspect: a man of contradictions", The Christian Science Monitor, Peter Grier, November 6, 2009),
Charles Darwin ("Man of Contradictions", Heartland, Homily for Seventh Sunday in Ordinary Time),
Buffalo Bill (The American Patriot's Almanac, William Bennet, John Cribb, 2008),
Pancho Villa (Pancho Villa: Strong Man of the Revolution, Larry Harris, 1996),
counterfeiter Waterman Ormsby (A Nation of Counterfeiters: Capitalists, Con Men, and the Making of the United States, Stephen Mihm, 2009),
fashion designer Nicola Finetti ("Nicola Finetti: Man of Contradictions", Oyster Magazine),
comic book superhero Wolverine (Wolverine Saga: Book One: Beginnings, Peter Sanderson et al),
Pope Benedict ("Deciphering Benedict: Catholics puzzle over a man of contradictions", Newsday, Rolando Pujoi, April 15, 2008),
suspected terrorist Dean Headley ("Terrorism suspect had roots in two cultures", New York Times, November 22, 2009),
Cornish historian Alfred Rowse (A Man of Contradictions, Richard Ollard, 2001),
Calvin Klein (The House of Klein: Fashion, Controversy, and a Business Obsession, Lisa Marsh, 2003)
and Martin Luther ("Man of Contradictions", Christianity Today, Cindy Crosby, May 1, 2004).

Tim

2009-12-19T10:35:00.006+11:00

Tim reminds you of The Humungus from Mad Max 2. Of a barbarian born in the last days who hurtles through life in a dune buggy wearing a mixture of bondage gear and sports padding. Of a man who has hooked a public address system up to his dune buggy so he can proclaim himself to the people of the refinery.

He doesn't bend. Either you enjoy his company or you don't; he didn't come here to accommodate you.

At a party, you'll find Tim flirting with a woman on the couch. His T-shirt will have ridden up over his potbelly, but he will not pull it back down. He sits there, in a room of some thirty people, flirting, with a T-shirt rolled up above his potbelly. One cannot help but find this inspiring. He does not care.