On Wednesday July 4, scientists at CERN announced that they had found a Higgs-like particle after analyzing results from the Large Hadron Collider. Researchers detected a "bump" in their data corresponding to a particle weighing in at 126 gigaelectronvolts (GeV), consistent with the Higgs Boson, which is believed to give mass to all other particles.
Researchers say they have "sonified" the data from the Atlas experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Switzerland, making it possible to "hear" the newly discovered Higgs Boson-like particle.
The researchers mapped intervals between values in the original data set to interval between notes in the melody. The same numerical value was associated to the same note. As the values increased or decreased, the pitch of the notes grew or diminished accordingly. The result is a melody which resembles the dotted rhythm of the habanera, a Cuban dance which became popular in Spain in the early 19th century.
...and, I have decided to throw my hat in the ring to be Mitt Romney's running mate.
Nobody else seems to want to do it, and, not that I'm remotely republican, (as I have been arrested in protest of the Bush administration, I was once employed by the lobbyist group Texas Campaign For The Environment, I regularly throw my support behind the Human Rights Campaign and other LGBT organizations, I used to write editorials for The Commemorator - which was a newsletter published by the Black Panther Party, most of my views lean towards Buddhism, I had eight years’ worth of dreadlocks down to my ass, most of my friends have a bit of a brownish tint to them, and I have a borderline obsession with Ani Difranco), but I figure he's got to balance the ticket somehow. And, after these neocon morons have alienated women, homosexuals, and pretty much anyone else who isn't a wealthy-white-male-christian-conservative, I figure I'm just the guy. I mean, after all, I am still a straight white male born and raised in west Texas. …the heart of Bush country.
And, with Dwam’s latest entry and an old favorite of mine by Mr. Joe Walsh, it has become clear to me that I am the obvious choice, and I would appreciate your support.
"Vote For Me"
I’d like to announce my candidacy,
I’d appreciate it if you’d vote for me.
I want to be Vice President.
Vote for me.
If I was Vice President you know what I’d do?
Pretty much anything I wanted to.
Vote for me. Vote for me.
I’d have a first class seat on Air Force One.
An awesome pad in Washington...D.C. (If you vote for me)
Play golf all day with heads of state,
If they brought beer wouldn’t that be great? I can’t wait!
Vote for me. Vote for me.
Well there are an awful lot of issues important to me.
Here’s my campaign policy,
Legislation, education,
occupation, arbitration,
conversation, equalization,
immigration, itemization,
immigration, race relations,
imitation, hospitalization...
I’m freaking out vote for me!
Well it’s the land of the brave, the home of the free.
That’s the funny thing about democracy.
A vote for me, is a vote for me!
That's what sets the poet free
I've had all the freedom I can stand
Merely in an effort to improve my financial situation, I will be forfeiting my subscription to Suicide Girls. I'll leave you with a few things that mean something to me and, for those of you with whom I share this country, maybe it will matter to you, too.
A Thanksgiving Prayer
William S. Burroughs
Thanks for the wild turkey and the passenger pigeons, destined to be shit out through wholesome American guts.
Thanks for a continent to despoil and poison.
Thanks for Indians to provide a modicum of challenge and danger.
Thanks for vast herds of bison to kill and skin leaving the carcasses to rot.
Thanks for bounties on wolves and coyotes.
Thanks for the American dream,
To vulgarize and to falsify until the bare lies shine through.
Thanks for the KKK.
For nigger-killin lawmen, feelin their notches.
For decent church-goin women, with their mean, pinched, bitter, evil faces.
Thanks for Kill a Queer for Christ stickers.
Thanks for laboratory AIDS.
Thanks for Prohibition and the war against drugs.
Thanks for a country where nobodys allowed to mind their own business.
Thanks for a nation of finks.
Yes, thanks for all the memories - all right lets see your arms!
You always were a headache and you always were a bore.
Thanks for the last and greatest betrayal of the last and greatest of human dreams.
And from me:
To a Roar
A few parting words in the form of bad poetry…
Because this is something that is still bothering me.
More than ten years later, I’m still waiting to see
Some form of retribution for the Project for a New American Century
Who hijacked this country from the supreme court floor
And, with the politics of fear,
Held us down for four years more
By doing everything they could
To convince the working poor
To keep on voting red against their own self-interest.
Praise be to the power of willful ignorance!
…and to the consequences suffered
Every
Day
Since.
The Patriot Act.
Turn the American Dream to a nightmarish hell
With a script ripped straight from the pages of George Orwell.
The least patriotic piece of legislature in this nation’s history,
P N A C mapped it all out,
The economics of war are no fucking mystery.
Tapping our phones like they’re entitled to know
Who has the audacity to question the status quo.
While neocon congress labeled dissent as obscene
Via lily-white spokesmen on Rupert Murdoch’s propaganda machine.
Ben said “Those who would sacrifice essential liberty for temporary safety deserve neither.”
But the democrats offer no real alternative, either.
Just two indiscernible sides of the same corporatist coin,
Touting the merits of Reaganomics,
It’ll all trickle down.
Just pick a side
And join.
And people still rush to swallow that red or blue pill,
Though the end result of either is that
SHIT RUNS DOWNHILL.
So, I find myself pissed off at the platitudes that bind
You know “An eye for an eye…
the whole world blind”
Because I’ll always believe we need to settle this score,
And these assholes can’t hide behind rhetoric anymore
When the voices of the hungry grow
From a whimper
To a roar.
I may well be back eventually. Until then, may the schwartz be with you.
R
Memory doesn't mean so much now that every moment is you-tubed, and it seems a shame to me. Some sense of romanticism is largely lost. I suppose twenty, thirty, maybe fifty years down the line, it will undoubtedly be wondrous to relive some long forgotten moment in life, but for now, (to me at least) it takes away from the urgency to document an event with the moment (or more importantly, the spirit of that moment) still fresh in mind.
I haven't really written anything in years. I've tried to sit down and push through the ridiculous chaos in my mind to some point of at least filling a page, but, as is the case now, that seems to be all it amounts to... just filling a page. A few weeks back, I briefly found a moment during Michael Ventura's reading at Book People, but I let it pass after struggling through a single paragraph. This was partly because the reading was over, the book signing had begun and an overzealous employee had immediately begun breaking down the audience seating, partly because the forty extra pounds I'm carrying these days had made the entire experience of sitting in a small folding chair wedged between a middle-aged fat man and a bookshelf incredibly uncomfortable, but mostly, it was due to the simple fact that I am out of the practice of forcing myself to write.
Ventura spoke of this during his reading. Once he made the decision that he was going to be a writer, he made himself write every day, and it has resulted in a long career of modest genius.
Michael Ventura's owned only one car his entire life: a green '69 Chevy Malibu. Its wheels have crisscrossed the American landscape over more miles than a round trip to the moon.
From Times Square to Terlingua, from Maine to Los Angeles, from Austin to Deadwood, Ventura has chronicled the continent in "a kind of switchback journey in image and thought." His essays convey a tactile and intimate relationship with land and people—and of course the car.
Ventura's distinctive voice and vision are familiar to readers of the Austin Chronicle (where many of these pieces first appeared), as well the Austin Sun, Psychotherapy Networker, and LA Weekly. In this collection, its title borrowed from a Butch Hancock song, the essays switch lanes with Hancock's evocative black-and-white photographs. Slowing down to take notice of a makeshift shrine in the Texas Panhandle or zipping along the New York Thruway before dawn, Ventura captures the details that make us think profoundly about work, music, poverty, beauty, our home on the planet and in the universe. About volcanoes and the Very Large Array. About friends and companions. About gods and goddesses and God.
With Lubbock, Texas, and the Southwest as the book's home base, If I Was a Highway roams widely and freely as Ventura takes readers on an unforgettable journey not only into the country but into the soul.
I spent the better part of six years in Lubbock, and during that time, I never felt comfortable or remotely inspired unless I knew I was on my way out, so it is strange to me that this guy, a relatively worldly and well connected, adventurous, beat inspired, liberal New York Jew has found himself at home in one of the most willfully ignorant, bigoted, barren, dust-blown holes I've ever known. There are undoubtedly a great many lengthy stories to explain that phenomenon, as he touched on at the reading, but I have to assume it lies largely in the idea that "it's the people that make the place". Along with his friends and sometime roommates, The Flatlanders, he was at the heart of a 1970's Cosmic Cowboy scene that led so many musicians and artists from west Texas to Austin. (In fact, I remember being down here in Austin about fifteen years ago, while still living in Lubbock, coming across a store called "Lubbock or Leave It". A shop dedicated to the musicians, authors, and artists who, once achieving a modicum of fame, got the hell out of there.) The weird thing is, I’m pretty sure he’s the only one who moved back…
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