i got stung by a wasp on my head this morning.   i also joijned twitter a few days ago.  it seems horrible.  does anyone twitter anything interesting?  who are all these people who are already following me?  they seem like spammers.  

Few
literary phrases have had as enduring an after life as "the two
cultures," coined by C. P. Snow to describe what he saw as a dangerous
schism between science and literary life. Yet few people actually seem
to read Snow's book bearing that title. Why bother when its main point
appears so evident?
It
was 50 years ago this May that Snow, an English physicist, civil
servant and novelist, delivered a lecture at Cambridge called "The Two
Cultures and the Scientific Revolution," which was later published in
book form. Snow's famous lament was that "the intellectual life of the
whole of Western society is increasingly being split into two polar
groups," consisting of scientists on the one hand and literary scholars
on the other. Snow largely blamed literary types for this "gulf of
mutual incomprehension." These intellectuals, Snow asserted, were
shamefully unembarrassed about not grasping, say, the second law of
thermodynamics — even though asking if someone knows it, he writes, "is
about the scientific equivalent of: Have you read a work of
Shakespeare's?"...
...Snow's
descriptions of the two cultures are not exactly subtle. Scientists, he
asserts, have "the future in their bones," while "the traditional
culture responds by wishing the future did not exist." Scientists, he
adds, are morally "the soundest group of intellectuals we have," while
literary ethics are more suspect. Literary culture has "temporary
periods" of moral failure, he argues, quoting a scientist friend who
mentions the fascist proclivities of Ezra Pound, William Butler Yeats
and Wyndham Lewis, and asks, "Didn't the influence of all they
represent bring Auschwitz that much nearer?" While Snow says those
examples are "not to be taken as representative of all writers," the
implication of his partial defense is clear.
Snow's
essay provoked a roaring, ad hominem response from the Cambridge critic
F. R. Leavis — who called Snow "intellectually as undistinguished as it
is possible to be" — and a more measured one from Lionel Trilling, who
nonetheless thought Snow had produced "a book which is mistaken in a
very large way indeed." Snow's cultural tribalism, Trilling argued,
impaired the "possibility of rational discourse."
Today,
others believe science now addresses the human condition in ways Snow
did not anticipate. For the past two decades, the editor and agent John Brockman has promoted the notion of a "third culture"
to describe scientists — notably evolutionary biologists, psychologists
and neuroscientists — who are "rendering visible the deeper meanings in
our lives" and superseding literary artists in their ability to "shape
the thoughts of their generation." Snow himself suggested in the 1960s
that social scientists could form a "third culture." ...

..All hail Jan Van Den Hemel and Andrew Hussie, who are re-editing Star Trek: The Next Generation
into these disturbing, surreal, and pretty hilarious shorts. There are
apparently 18 of 'em, including Picard trying to kill Counselor Troi
with music, so if you liked this one, check out the rest here. And if
this is old, I don't care -- none of you lazy bastards tipped me off,
so I had to find this from warming glow.  And it's early and I haven't had my coffee yet, rendering me unable to care about anything, even kittens.

The ‘80s were supposed to be a harmless time for toys and the cartoons
that sold them. Whether shilling lines of action figures or promoting
characters who would eventually be action figures, these shows were
designed to eat up kids’ attention in 30-minute blocks while
ham-handedly promoting good citizenship and hygiene. In spite of this,
cartoons sometimes snuck in certain moments that were clearly designed
to break impressionable minds and pervert the youth of America.

One can only blame illegal substances for the exceptionally
large number of bat-shit insane, totally weird, fantastically awesome
or otherwise completely misleading cover art designs to original NES games. Sometimes
hilarious, sometimes tragic, these covers often had nothing to do with
the game, as if the people bringing it over had never seen a single
screenshot from the cartridge inside.

i'm reading a great book about subatomic particles called the lightness of being.  thorughout my adulthood i haven't been able to stop thinking about the meaning of life and the nature of being.  i think people mostly look to art or religion to find answers to big questions, but this book about quantum chromo dynamics has more answers than i've found anywhere else.  i like it.

as the economies of the world collapse and existential doubt overwhelms the collective consciousness, it is is delightful to turn inward and cultivate the higher pleasures of the mind, rather than concern oneself with babylon and the rat race.   what does it matter if the 'growth model' of economics is finally and permenently discredited?  i don't think that we've arrived at that point, but if we have i want to be ready. 

do you watch madmen?   i do.   january jones was my first reason, but now i care about all the characters.  i guess that's what happens when you get a new tv.   we cast the evil eye out of our domacile for about a year before i broke down.   the prices at costco were too good to ignore.  now i bast in the warm close of 1080i.  it's nice.
what has happened to me?   i have a cold.  is that why i'm so lame?  i need to do more drugs, clearly.  my veins are hungry. i'm gunna go smoke.