My friend Jason sent me the following e-mail:

Space Kat

Today Joey revealed to me his space ship which he used to get to this planet. He also telepathically hacked my computer with his mind and made the attached images appear on my Desktop. He then communicated to me that these images are of him as a juvenile, recorded some 8,000 years ago. His race long ago discovered immortality and they can be reborn in any form. He chose the form of Terran feline so that he could have a comparatively short respite of comfort and luxury after spending many decades in a thought chamber. I asked what a thought chamber was but he told me our language lacks the appropriate words to adequately describe it. Many late night discussions I have had with Joey have revolved around his ancient and alien philosophy, and they have in no small part served as an inspiration for many themes in my book. He has told me that he seeks only to promote a greater consciousness among humanity and hopes that we make it past our “technological adolescence” as his species did. He wished that I share his sentiments with a broader audience, and hence this e-mail. (more…)

Here‘s a Devo song that should be rewritten for Dick Cheney:

he got big and fat
and he was ridin’ high
makin’ lots of cash
trashin’ others’ lives
now Cheney’s in a wheelchair and I don’t care

Anyway, what did everyone think of Elizabeth Alexander’s inaugural poem? I think mine was better. The news on whether the new administration will in fact clean the wound is still mixed.

Frank Zappa, style icon? (found here)

Trendsetters are rushing to buy the “261 top” – with the latest star to wear it being American Idol judge Randy Jackson.

He wore it next to Simon Cowell and Paula Abdul on the hit show at the weekend.

The unlikely fashion trend goes back to 1980 and an equally unlikely source – the late rock legend Frank Zappa.

It should also be noted that, as far as I can tell, Frank Zappa invented the concept of the ironic T-shirt, and the ironically blue-collar T-shirt, circa 1967. (I don’t think he should be held responsible for subsequent developments of that trend any more than Nirvana should be held responsible for Pearl Jam.) He also presaged hip-hop fashion.

update: I just remembered, I should link to this Zappa interview on fashion:

Before we left, Frank and I were pals and he wanted very much to give tips on what he’d like to see as jewelry. Since jewelry catches onto the instruments, he would like to have it ingrown into the skin, like, let’s say, a watch transplanted into your wrist with phosphorescent digits so that you could see it through the skin, and in the dark. Not very practical? Well, Frank is a genius, and geniuses aren’t always practical.

“We tortured Qahtani. His treatment met the legal definition of torture. And that’s why I did not refer the case [for prosecution].”

Speaking of torture, if you want to get a sense of the state of human rights in the US, you only need to check out our prison rape statistics.

Also, can someone tell me: is there really life on Mars, or is the Sun full of shit?

The greatest actor of all time just died.

Words cannot express my utter awe at Patrick McGoohan’s coolness, so I’ll shut up.

Obama Unlikely To Quickly Close Gitmo
Obama Signals His Reluctance to Look Into Bush Policies
(but John Conyers has a better idea)
EDIT: DEVELOPING… (as Drudge would say)

I don’t really feel like writing about the above, because a) I already did, and b) this is like the septillionth post in a row that I’ve made on political subjects. I promise I’ll start writing more about other things that interest me, like filter design, hussar tunics, or the amazing drum fills in “Don’t You (Forget About Me)” (the best one is at 3:44, segueing from the four-on-the-floor kick drum back to the standard pattern).

I was also going to write a post on apologists for economic oppression who hide behind a veneer of medical respectability, and said post was going to cite Adorno‘s observations about the “bourgeois whose existence is split into a business life and a private life, whose private life is split into keeping up his public image and intimacy, whose intimacy is split into the surly partnership of marriage and the bitter comfort of being quite alone, at odds with himself and everybody else,” and also Václav Havel’s social auto-totality, and also some stuff about the unholy marriage between universal surveillance and the atomization of the individual under late capitalism, but seriously, fuck it.

Probably the only inaugural poem you’ll need to read this year:

history is torn and blistery
the future’s sutures are a mystery
wooed by healing thoughts, we swooned
and thus forgot to clean the wound

(also, I decided to try putting poems in block quotes)

So last week Claiborne Pell died. This Providence Journal article from 1995 is a good summary of the career of the former US Senator from Rhode Island (surprising, given what a shit publication it is). A relevant quote:

“It’s very fundamental in politics to be what you are,” says Sen. John H. Chafee. “‘To thine own self be true.’ Don’t be out there dropping your g’s and trying to get into a ‘dese and dose’ way of speaking to be one of the guys.”

But perhaps more germane to Poetariat’s interests was Pell’s suitably Lovecraftian interest in the paranormal. From this Discover article on the reverse speech phenomenon:

A couple of years ago Oates met with C. B. Scott Jones, a former Navy fighter pilot who was on the staff of Senator Claiborne Pell of Rhode Island. Thanks to a demonstration using his own speech, Scott Jones was convinced that Oates has really got something here. A few months later, during the Gulf crisis, Oates told him that press conferences and speeches of high U.S. officials, when played backward, kept yielding the name Simone. Scott Jones wrote Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney, warning him that if Simone was a code word, the cat was out of the bag (or, at least, the tac was out of the gab).

One thing that was soon playing backward in Washington was Scott Jones’s career on Capitol Hill. Pell, a Democrat facing a fight for reelection, dropped him. Now Scott Jones heads the Human Potential Foundation, whose mission, he says, is to fund research that is not being funded anywhere else. (more…)