Out and about today, I ended up in a parking lot.
Most people don’t think of themselves as ending up in a parking lot, because usually they are moving through the parking lot on their way to some other place. But I was in a parking lot, on my way to some other place.
It was then that I realized that the landscape artist in charge of this lot was a genius of the parking bonsai form.
Many are not familiar with this form, even though they see it all the time. It is incredibly subtle and easily mistaken for a lack of care. But ultimately, he who can create art with the fewest materials and the least effort surely is the most skilled of all artists.
I first noticed the work of this anonymous artist in this specimen:
Truly, not the greatest work, but note the details of the exposed root system:
The seemingly starved and desperate way these roots emerge from the soil, the abused bark, the spotty grass plugs… If the skill with which these elements are used to convey the human condition were applied to the rest of the tree, this would be a powerful, powerful work.
Which brings me to another work present there in the parking lot:
This astonishing piece conveys so much with so little, it takes my breath away.
The puckered, scarred bark, as if having been hit by a car, and the rakish shakan angle illustrate a world gone awry. The exposed, weathered root system juxtaposed with the newly sprouting trunk creates a dynamic tension between decay and new life. In total: A potent symbol of contempt toward nature in a post-human time.
My congratulations to the anonymous artist brave enough to make such a statement in the parking lot of a Taco Time.
Month: August 2003
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Music: ‘Zoetrope‘ by Boards of Canada
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Washington Monthly’s Mendacity Index, rating the mendacity of the four most recent US presidents. Guess who loses.
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A little extra bored this morning, so I decided to dissect a junk email that had escaped my filter.
It’s from that most reputable of companies, teenyfuk.com. It’s composed of poorly-formed HTML, and it has img URLs that look like this:
<img src=”http://railnetline.com/teenyf-graphic/
images/tf.jpg?ba=teenyf-graphic&bb=MYEMAILNAME&bc=
MYEMAILDOMAIN.com” border=”0″>
The ‘MYEMAILNAME’ and ‘MYEMAILDOMAIN’ were filled in with parts of my email address. So when the images are loaded by my email client, the request it sends to the server encodes my email address as valid. This is why I have ‘auto-load images’ turned off in my email client.
Also, there’s the question: How did it evade my junk mail filter? The answer is this line:
<font size=”1″ color=”#000099″>portable titter alertedly cautions marketable RzneXhfrargRzneXzvyr23.pbzRzneX slingshot install lot purging verbose dimensionally olympian random brackish filters abstains malden blameworthy choreograph quakes </font>
It’s some random words, to spoof the mail client’s Bayesian filter.
But not only that, it’s my email address encoded again, in the Rznex… part. I can tell by the ’23.’ If you’re the spammer, and you’re reading this, you can decode the above and know my email address right now. It’s also possible that the ‘random’ words aren’t random at all, and are keys to whatever encryption method is being used to turn my email address into the Rznex.. part.
So I have to say: As UCE goes, this is pretty sophisticated. Hats off to the evildoers. Now, however, I get to click on my ‘This Is Junk Email’ button, and add it to the Bayesian filter. Buh-bye.
Also: Why doesn’t Xanga preserve the encoded greater-than and less-than that allows me to post HTML to my ‘blog? If I try to edit the ‘blog after it’s posted, I end up looking at < and >, rather than ampersand-lt-semicolon and it’s pal… -
Earlier this morning I woke up from a dream about Tony Banks, ex-keyboard player for Genesis. Remember Genesis?
I was at a coffeehouse, and they had a rack of records for sale, and among them was the ultra-rare first pressing of Tony’s ‘The Fugitive,’ with a free poster and comic book inside.
Note that there’s a real Tony Banks record called ‘The Fugitive.’ Follow the link to listen to some samples if you want to. It came out just after Phil Collins’ ‘Hello, I Must Be Going.’ It was a critical and financial failure. So in actuality, no Tony Banks record could be nearly as cool as this one was. The only reason the first pressing is rare is that they didn’t make many, at the time or subsequently.
I know all this because in the early and mid 80s, I was obsessed with Genesis. The third album I ever bought was Genesis’ ‘Duke,’ which I still enjoy to this day. (1 was Chuck Mangione’s ‘Feels So Good,’ 2 was The Police’s, ‘Ghost In The Machine.’ I feel like I progressed well in that evolution). I eventually went about obsessively collecting every Genesis album, and every solo album put out by every member of Genesis. With Phil Collins, that was easy, until he started exclusively writing sappy ballads. ‘Don’t Let Him Steal Your Heart Away’ was the beginning of the end. Mike Rutherford fared pretty well, with a couple decent solo records, and then Mike + The Mechanics. Peter Gabriel… Well. No comment necessary.
Tony Banks, however…
Back in the dream, I was elated at the find! I gently squeezed it to see if there were more than just the LP inside, and indeed there was. It had the comic book and poster!
I pulled the dust jacket out and examined the LP. I dug around in the sleeve. Pulled out the poster and opened it up. I was making a little mess of Tony Banks stuff in that corner of the coffeehouse.
Finally, I got to the comic book. Oh, joy! I pulled it out and it was a tiny thing, about the size of a Jack Chick comic. I thought, “Geez, I’m really fetishizing this,” and just then people around me started saying to each other, “He’s really fetishizing this…”
My joy dashed on rocks, I put the stuff back in the sleeve and put the sleeve back in the rack. I knew that the album wasn’t worth what they were asking for it, from a musical standpoint. I had heard it.
So, more stuff happened in the dream and I eventually woke up. I put on the ‘Abacab’ CD and made coffee. I thought, ‘I wonder how much Tony Banks has made it onto gnutella?’
None. Nada. All search results lead to Eminem and 50 Cent, of all people.
Is gnutella a threshhold between the past and the present in popular culture, the same way the transition from LP to CD was? I don’t have an Edison cylinder player, so it’s hard for me to judge material recorded on them… -
I just wanted to link to this UK poll about disability-related epithets, which dingus5 linked to a while back. Some folks who read me might be interested.
My comment to dingus5′s ‘blog:
The most telling element of that poll is the difference between responses by the disabled and those by the non-disabled.
‘Brave’ is #3 among the disabled, essentially tied for second, and doesn’t make the top 10 among the non-disabled. The nominee list was created by disabled folks, which is how ‘brave’ got in there in the first place.
Updated:
Here’s a link that goes a long way toward describing unintentional condescension toward the disabled. -
You know what I like most about OpenBSD?
Each release has a theme song. They’re actually pretty good, too, if you’re a unix geek.
