Category Archives: Uncategorized
Space Janitor
The Black Hotdog Of Tokyo
Writing In Dreamtime
A couple weeks back I had a dream where I was walking by someone reading a newspaper, and for some reason, I felt like I needed to read the text. And so I leaned over and started reading. I got about ten words in, then things started to break down; everything after the first half sentence was pure nonsense. There were letters in word-sized chunks, but they might as well have been lorem ipsum. And this made no sense in the logic of the dream. But then, while still in the dream, I realized that I was dreaming, and therefore the text on the paper would have to come out of my imagination (along with all the rest of the world). And given that, dynamically-generated text in a dream was going to be impossible for me because there is absolutely no way I can dream-up new text and get it onto the 'paper' faster than I can read it. I just don't have the processing power to create faster than I can consume. Also, reading in a dream is the same process as reading in real life...?
Since then, I've had two more of these dreams: I had to read some scrolling TV text, then a novel. As with the newspaper, the text starts out OK for the first few words, then dissolves into sheer nonsense. And in both cases, I knew exactly what was happening, and I laughed at it.
So, it's become a joke I tell myself when I'm asleep.
Enough
Might it be possible for the US media to please STFU about George Zimmerman, now?
Too damned depressing.
Back?
OK. Back again.
For what it's worth.
Funny
The Forbidden Island
After a tense standoff lasting a few more days, the crew of the Primrose were evacuated by helicopter to safety. They were lucky to get away: It was their misfortune to have run aground just offshore of one of the strangest islands on Earth, and probably the very last of its kind. Anthropologists believe the men who appeared on the beach that morning in 1981 are members of a hunter-gatherer tribe that has lived on the island for 65,000 years. That's 35,000 years before the last ice age, 55,000 years before the great woolly mammoths disappeared from North America, and 62,000 years before the ancient Egyptians built the pyramids at Giza. These people are believed to be the direct descendants of the first humans out of Africa.
(article originally appeared in "Uncle John's 24-Karat Gold Bathroom Reader")