I think I got about two hours sleep last night. I stayed up to finish listening to one of the dumbest books I've ever downloaded: Blasphemy. Don't bother. Americans are obsessed with Religion, especially when they're talking about Science. Who are we? Why are we here? What's it all about? Jesus Christ, give it a rest already!
Life isn't like that. The important questions are more like this: Why did I wake up so fucking early? Ooof. Oh well, Ross Macdonald is still playing in the background. I'm having weird dreams loosely based on The Far Side of the Dollar. I'd give you the Audible.com links, but the site seems set up to discourage word-of-mouth marketing. Good move. Nonetheless, I am hugely appreciative to Don Katz at Audible for making all these books accessible to an aging shut-in such as myself. Anyway, where was I? What's it all about? Oh yes. I love Ross Macdonald, but I have no freaking idea what's going on in this book.
Well, gotta take a piss so I guess I might as well check my email too. Somehow, the two actions are irrevocably associated in my quasi-conscious mind. Aha, here's a good one: We've Missed You At Dean & DeLuca!
It's so good to be loved.
So I go there. Oh yes, and I missed you too! Listen, I don't often ask you for anything, right? No more than ten or twelve times a year. But you could really help me out here.
OMG, I'm fresh out. And it's less than $6,000 a pound! Don't everyone gift me at once, though, or I'll need to rent a refrigerator truck.
But I get hung up on the D&D logo. Remember, I'm still half asleep.
I'm wondering what that font is. I'm trying to learn my fonts. Why? How the fuck should I know? Fortunately, I happened to know that there's this page called What the Font? So I go there and drop in that URL. I see. So it's some subspecies of Copperplate Gothic. I decide to make my own version.
As you can see, mine is bigger.
And oh look, here's fontmail from Brian Millar in London, whose homepage, even all these years later, still makes me laugh. It's like the James Bond of IT circa 1959. So here are a few clips from his mail.
I write to Brian saying, "I love the sample callouts that seem to be traditional in this subculture. Like: obelisks & oleanders! poisonous arrow frog!"
Within minutes he replies: "They are codes ordering attacks by dutch men with stubble."
You learn something new every day.
So I try my own...
As you can see, though, I'm a rank novice.
Then, don't ask how (I forget), I found this picture of the Carnegie Mellon quad. I used to go there every day and they would pay me money. Something about the Robotics Institute, if memory serves. I never did give much of a shit about robotics.
Somewhere in there, I learned that Joshua Lederberg had died. That's a picture of him in 1958. I met him at his Stanford lab, so it must have been 1959 or so. I was maybe 12. He gave me some slime mold, which is a lot cooler than it sounds. It ate oatmeal. I wonder what happened to it.The stuff is basically immortal, as Lederberg pointed out to me. I had a bacteriology lab in my basement back then. I knew a lot about it. But not as much as he did. I was sad to hear he was dead. He was 82, though, which is a pretty good run. And he sure did a bunch of important stuff. Plus, he was nice to me.
Then it was off to the NY Times to check the news. Oh ho, I see the Serbs are once again expressing their deep and abiding love of the United States of America.
How I got from there to this quote I found in a HighBeam Research review of Subject to Delusions: Narcissism, Modernism, Gender by Caroline Rupprecht, is anybody's guess.
Freud's theory of narcissism, Rupprecht argues, hinges on representation: the myth of Narcissus falling in love with his reflection necessarily introduces the seductions and dangers of merging with the world of images.
His or her reflection, I hasten to add. It's shocking that a purported work of feminist scholarship would stoop to such linguistic sexism; Bullfinch be fucked.
Meanwhile, out of my speakers, Ross Macdonald is still wailing away, telling my fortune like some hyperstochastic digital I Ching: "He shouldn't have said it. A second later his eyes showed that he knew he shouldn't have."
So that was pretty much the first two hours of today.