echo

you asked for it
Through some SF MOMA connection we ended up with all of Matthew Barney's Petroleum jelly/parifin petrol gak from the recent show. It was a scheme cooked up by Jim the lease holder for our space. He has some ideas what to do with it. Anyway the day after he got the stuff and brought it into the space a couple of shopmates decided it would be a great idea to bathe Jim in the jelly. So they heated up two 55 gallon drums to get them nice and liquid and used the fork lift to administer the jelly to Jim. Jim was pinned down in a kiddie pool whilst jelly was scooped out on him (it didn't quite get liquid). The whole thing erupted in a massive jelly fight. A which point I kept my distance. Incidently the last name of the guy who instigated the jelly baptisim is Valdez. The incident is known as the Valdez disaster not to be confused with the Exxon Valdez disaster. Anyway it took over a week to clean the shop. People were washing the jelly off with biodiesel and or mineral spirits thinner. Worst idea for a party ever! though fun to talk about.

video

set up
http://youtube.com/watch?v=KtETJO5wUS0

bathing Jim
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O4Ji20Twk9g

pictures
http://www.theshipyard.org/vaseline9_30_06/valdezdisater.html

I love the ending of the Tom Cruise version. He and his daughter have been through hell, they finally get to Boston and, when they meet up with the rest of his family, everyone looks as if they've been posing for a Pottery Barn ad. They're all in various sweaters, drinking warm cider, like, "Oh hey, Tom. Glad you made it. Let's go yachting."

It's awesome.

Gah, I'd love an 8x10 of your beautiful self, but alas, as usual I'm skint

Maybe I shouldn't have gotten myself fired

Take care

Love

Jamie

Never sell your pirate flag. You never know when you might need it.

I have this tendency to click on your profile pic. I can't seem to resist your red hair and sweet expression.

I tend to regard God as mostly just a reification sculpted by humam emotional needs.

It seems to me that a lot of people do not see probablility's hand in sculpting the structure of the world. Probability is in a sense halfway between order and chaos, and it gives things shape and structure. If you look at a soap bubble floating in the air, it's shaped by the pressures of the random motion of molecules inside and outside, and by the cohesive fluidity of the soap and water. You have random particle motion, but some attraction between some of the particles, and it creates a very distinctive, non-random shape, or rather a shape formed by the evening out of the rndom motions of a great many interacting particles.

Evolution is similar, albeit far more complex process. Each creature is a walking question( or you cold say a walking answer to a question ) : can this creature, with this particular set of genetic instructions, and the physical and behavioral traits they generate, survive in this particular environment? The creatures and their environment interact and return a bunch of yes yes yes no no no yes no yes yes no no no yes no and the survivors, the yeses, mix their DNA together and generate a new generation of walking question/answers.
Probability shapes organisms by trial and error, sort of feeling out what works. Sexual reproduction works, and creates much more complex creatures than something like an asexually reproducing bacterium, because the combination of different genetic materials from different organisms creates variation in their offspring, and reduces the possiblity that the offspring will be wiped out by some environmental event that none of them are able to cope with. Again, here is probability; organisms take their shape from the set of genetic instructions that for whatever reasons in a given time and place have the highest probablility of survival. It is a random, non-directed process that produces non-random, highly structured results. Halfway between Intelligent Design and simple chaos. Evolution happens because the variation in each generation of new organisms allows new answers the question of survival to develop as environmental factors affecting survival change over time.

I'm a student of Buddhism and there's a lot of variation among differing sects as to whether there is something analagous to the Christian notion of a soul. It is central to the notion of becoming enlightened to dispel the notion of a distinct individual soul and the cognitive distortions and attachments that perpetuate that notion. Myself I have a feeling that mere matter energy and probability cannot account for certain aspects of conscious being, and by that I mean that they don't appear to me to account for colors. When a bunch of photons hit our retinas, an electorchemical impulse travels back along our optic nerves and bounces around in our brains in wondrous complex ways with one result being that we see colors. Thing is, those colors can only exist in our minds, as far as I can tell. A neuron in the brain has never been exposed to light, all it ever does is relay electrochemical impulses, it can never see. What then, are these colors? If differing neurotransmitters are associated wth different colors, what is this redness of chemical X and the blueness of chemical Y? How to they interact to allow me to see 16 million or more colors it I weren't somewhat color blind? It seems to me that this at least hints at a nonmaterial aspect of consciousness, wherein resides certain information that I don't think actually exists in the world of matter/energy/space-time. But then I don't know how the hell this field of universal consciousness, if we are to call it that, interacts with my electrochemical Neurons. Other than to suggest that somehow a weak force like Universal consciousness might be able to interact with matter becasue matter is itself made of probability. An electron in its orbital has no actual position, its orbital is just a probabliity field wherein the electron may exist, anywhere within it, at a given time. Given this certain lax of concrete fixity of fundamental particles, a force of universal consciouness, might be able to interact with them. And that's about as far as I can go with that notion at this time. I hope that all this was at least a little bit interesting.

God is complete bullshit fabricated to control you
evolution is at least an honest attempt to scratch the surface of how we came to be.
intelligent design..... Google flying spaghetti monster

"dogs fucked the pope no fault of mine"
HST RIP

those are extremly scary
i just kinda skipped that episode

When I'm running late in the morning or I've woken up with a hangover, this is the song that plays in a constant loop in my head:

Enjoy

Funny you should say that about being in the middle of nowhere...I'm having the same issue myself these days. I've got the dichotemy of being party city-girl and part redneck! I've been in the boonies for two months now, love it, but am itching to get back into the city ASAP! Gotta let the raucous rockstar come out to play!

took me a beat to get that. primarily because it is hard to make the correlation between what you've got going on and plumbing.

plumbing is like the internet: it's a series of tubes

A taste of the outside world. My poor kitty only gets to look from the window till she's fixed.

if you like scifi

then you should go see Mammoth.

alternatively, you can wait for our next films.

I'm a nerd, but i'm not good at media stuff strangely, just hacking and video games.

just being sarcastic...

;-)

I've tried all sorts off products so far. I put them all in different categories and the ones that make it into the ' made me cry like an overweight child in a toy shop' category I plan to avoid using in the future. It's good science, see ?

Hope you find us all welcoming anyway. You'll love Scotland its beautiful. Not all of it I have to say.

Just had a look at the pictures you put up. You just keep getting more beautiful. How the fuck can you stand it?