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WORLD AIDS DAY
this year world aids day is about "stigma and discrimination". i guess that's a pretty big deal for hiv and aids.
i don't know who said "we have nothing to fear but fear itself", some american president i think. you know what? he was right, i think.
anyway, discrimination through fear is one of the ways they break us up. you probably have more in common with some of the people who are HIV+ than you do with the people who run your town, your government.
and you'll say "how do i have anything in common with people who are gay, or who inject drugs, or who are promiscuous sexually, or haemophiliac, or who have a parent or a partner who is one of those things?"
and i will say what you have in common is that you are a husband, wife, mother, father, child, family member, community member, you are a crew member of spaceship earth, and that by listing the types of behaviour in that question you are allowing fear to drive the facts from your mind.
attitudes to HIV & AIDS
hiv
Yahoo
The Body
The US Centers for Disease Control
The NAMES Project
Gay Men's Health Crisis
Avert
Pediatric AIDS Foundation
Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS
AIDS 101
HIV Education Prison Project
United Nations AIDS Project
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LIFE ON EARTH
now call me pernickety, but isn't there something a little bit sad about being able to build new life and getting all excited about using it to create something that will replace petrol?
i mean, here we are, gods, and we are all dick-in-hand about the internal combustion engine.
i mean, like, fucking hell, right?
feed the machine, feed the machine...and on the seventh day we will rest? down at the kwiki mart? a little sunday consumerism.
sometimes you kinda give up hope, y'know?
creating artificial bugs
genome man to create new life
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MYRA ET AL
on a day like today, it is easy to be robbed of words. it is easy to drown beneath the shrieks of the red tops and the murmurings of those who seek redemption themselves by redeeming all in others.
and so, i borrow these words, published in 1624 by john donne:
"No man is an island, entire of itself; every
man is a piece of the continent, a part of the
main. If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory
were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or
of thine own were: any man's death diminishes
me, because I am involved in mankind, and
therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee."
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DECONSUMPTION
here's a notion. but perhaps a little too much religious flavouring in it for me...
buy nothing day
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FROM THE MOUTHS OF BABES
this has to be one of the cleverest pieces of flash programing i've seen in ages.
go on, click on it and desecrate the world's greatest icon of authority.
bush speech
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starfish-crippled angels
lie scattered
under the dome of heaven
spread-eagled flotsam cherubim
the icy silverfish of heaven
the fallen angelfish of heaven
bloo white in the crisp
white sand
touch these now shrouded
angels
heaven’s bloo-grey
expatriates, star-fished
on their fate
fallen, as the roof of
heaven
falls inwards
fallen as the dome of
heaven
falls inwards
fallen as the icing-cake
bridesmaids of a crippled
angel fish heaven
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TELLING BIG LIES
this is a vox v830 distortion booster.
i guess that kinda translates as something that makes the voice of lies get bigger...
anyhow, i got no need to be speaking through it (or even listening to lies no more) so it'll just be making my vox duotone geetar sound oh so bittersweet.
vox v830 distortion-booster page
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JUST A MINUTE
what's with all this two minutes' silence all of a sudden?
this is a new phenomenon and i don't like it. i don't like it at all.
already we have the whole remembrance stuff hijacked by men in uniforms and some kind of god-queen-country jingoism.
i mean, all those people who died were mostly ordinary people who had to go to fight. they weren't soldiers, they were boys. to be honest, i find air vice marshalls and generals-in-chief "honouring the dead" a little sickening.
american writer kurt vonnegut says that the men who were in the trenches in 1918 when the fighting stopped said that the silence was like the voice of god. i can believe it and i can try to cherish that moment and feel the loss of all those people.
but i can do that all the time, i can do that while we're thinking about kicking iraq again, while we are in afghanistan and while people are being killed in bali.
but "two" minutes is cheap. for goodness' sake has this currency of grief become so devalued that we measure it in the number of seconds we are silent?
the whole concept of two minutes being better than one is fucked up.
oh and i don't want to do it in public. i get upset about this war stuff and i won't jingo it up and try to have the straightest back or the most determined expression on my "grieving" face. i want to sob, goddamit, and i'll do it in private and i'll do it for as long as i want.
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THE GREATEST SHOW ON EARTH
listen now: we went to the circus and sat ringside for all the thrills and spill of big top entertainment.
this was our hat trick. in our time we have visited the russian state circus, the uncle sam's american circus and now the chinese state circus.
we like circuses. on telly circuses don't work. they are not big enough on the little box. telly people are not really people (they are larger than life - ie they are lies) but circus people, in a real live circus tent with icky, sticky grass under the collapsible chairs, are real people.
and when real people go flying through the air 30 feet is a long way up. it truly is a death-defying long way up and it's scary and exciting and oh so sweet.
also in real life, circus people drop things and make mistakes and still have to do a big "ta-daaaa!!" at the end of their act and we clap them because they are human and make mistakes in front of us all.
and we noticed this: circuses cannot help but reveal, perhaps exemplify, national cultures and characteristics.
the russian show was a lot of pomp and circumstance, serious people with lots of natural dignity, they seem to occupy their space and light like imperial bears.
guess what? the american circus had lots and lots of internal combustion engine stuff - fast motorbikes in a little tiny cageball a-whizzing round scaring the wits out of you just a few feet away and a lovely clown car with squirty water and lots of bangs.
much of the chinese show was about balance and precision, grace and movement.
we like circuses and we like circus people. we can't wait for the next one.
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KILLER ANGELS
and from these ashes
rises up the death angel:
scraps from bloody bones
bloody rags from bloody bones
shredded wings of tatters,
the deaths head death angel,
like leda's swan to rape
even bleaching remnants
the rush of wings,
a rush of lies,
scatter April lilacs
on scarred land
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DIWALI NOT GUY FAWKES
you celebrate torturing catholics if you like. me? i'd rather join in the festival of light.
if it's alright for the jains, it's alright for me.
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UTOPIAN ENTREPRENEUR
"Our language-processing circuits have been fried by the endless crap pumped out by television, billboards, "news" media, sitcoms, ATM screens."
so says brenda laurel. i met brenda about three years ago. i tell you this, she's alright.
a few crazy people...
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YUM YUM
kippers for breakfast.
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