Rats in the Belfry

16.4.12

Feel the Burn!

If you're walking down the streets
of your town one day
and you see one of these....

run!

Why?

Because it's the Active Denial System, that's why...

And if you're anywhere up to 700 metres
in front of it, this machine can focus a beam
of 3.2mm wave electromagnetic radiation on you.

This beam can heat the water and fat molecules
of your skin, causing their temperature
to rise by up to 50C.

It's an all-pain, our gain way to clear the streets
of unsightly rabble with no messy clean-up
or lengthy post-mortems.
Under development for more than 15 years,
we are assured by both the manufacturers
and their current customers that
it's completely safe.

Today's proponents of electromagnetic crowd control techniques invoke essentially the same argument that psycho-chemical warfare boosters used in the 1950s:

Would you rather be zapped – or dosed –
by a nonlethal device or shot to death
by conventional firepower?

That's freedom of choice.
Baby.

Coming soon to a demonstration near you?
Time will tell...

the Weapon That's a Hot Topic

here's a review - with video - from a blog in Pakistan

where can you can get one?
RIGHT HERE

!

9.4.12

Marshall McLuhan - Electronic Prophet

We look at the present
through a rear-view mirror.
We march backwards
into the future.

Electric circuitry is Orientalizing the West.
The contained, the distinct, the separate -
our Western legacy-
are being replaced by the flowing,
the unified, the fused.

The story of modern America begins
with the discovery of the white man
by the Indians.

I think of art, at its most significant, as a DEW line,
a Distant Early Warning system that can always
relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning
to happen to it.

Art is anything you can get away with.

Historians and archaeologists will one day discover
that the ads of our time are the richest and most
faithful reflections that any society ever made
of its entire range of activities.

The new electronic independence
re-creates the world in the image
of a global village.

“The computer is the most extraordinary of man's technological clothing; it's an extension of our
central nervous system.

Beside it, the wheel is a mere hula-hoop.”

Politics offers yesterday’s answers
to today’s questions.

One of the effects of living with electric
information is that we live habitually
in a state of information overload.

There's always more than you can cope with.

I don't necessarily agree with everything I say.

The answers are always inside
the problem, not outside.

I wouldn't have seen it if I hadn't believed it.

Canada is the only country in the world
that knows how to live without an identity.

If the nineteenth century was the age
of the editorial chair, ours is the century
of the psychiatrist's couch.

Innumerable confusions and a feeling of despair
invariably emerge in periods of great technological
and cultural transition.

When you are on the phone or on the air,
you have no body.

In this electronic age we see ourselves being
translated more and more into the form of
information, moving toward the technological
extension of consciousness.

Today each of us lives several hundred years
in a decade.

If it works, it’s obsolete.

The nature of people demands that most of them
be engaged in the most frivolous possible activities— like making money.

The future of the book is the blurb.

A point of view can be a dangerous luxury
when substituted for insight and understanding.

***

7.4.12

the Fabulous 50s

for anybody who lived through them,
the 50s were not particularly fabulous.

but in retrospect, there does seem to be
a consensus that they looked fabulous.

it also seems to me that, looking back
from this brave new post-feminist millennium,
that they eroticized absolutely everything
around them...

lamps are sexy?
little banjos are kind of hot?

In-Sink-erators are a turn-on?

Barbasol? Gautier??

i have been to exactly one martini party in my life,
where i learned that martinis were actually the acid of the 50s...

so the Dali-esque surreality of the these next two
makes its' own sense of that time and that place...

i guess the 50s were "differently fabulous".

you can find awesome amounts
of this kind of fabulous
at this amazing site!

.

*

5.4.12

What Price Security?

I don't understand why it takes so many people
and so much equipment to screen passengers
at the airport.

It seems like a few people wearing these
would be able to spot evil terrorists in a minute.

10 Things I Don't Need (at all)

as a yang to the yin of the immediately
previous post, and as a testament
to the fact that my life is not
an ongoing quest for more stuff...

here are 10 things i've come across
on that same journey down the info
freeway that i do not want...

liver salts? i believe my interior
as clean as i need it to be...

odd pants? no, thank-you...
not even at admittedly great price.

a jack-in-the-bra?
too super-creepy for me.

a nose re-maker?
i don't care if it's German, my nose is fine.

i don't have a jones for anything Kool-Aid related.

Doctor Pepper served hot?

Way beyond w.t.f.

No one wants this.

98%?

i don't care how sanitized they are...

and the last thing i need underfoot
is a rug rat trying to bum smokes all day.

*

10 Things I Really Need

i waste acres of lifetime bumbling down all kinds of off ramps along the information highway of late, and finding myself in an odd place vis-a-vis my citizenship in our consumer society.

i come across things that i want but can't buy.
it's not my cash flow, which is the traditional obstacle between my desires and i, it's Time itself.