“I had lunch with ya boy Lee Corso today, no joke. Nicest dude ever”
I really had no idea that Lee and myself we’re that close? So flash forward to today. I’m working out at the gym…rocking the machines. I notice this GOLIATH next to me killing it, putting in work. As he walks in front of me to the next machine to crush I notice it’s…Karl Malone? Is Karl Malone my constant? When he was playing for the Jazz I ran into him a handful of times…the airport, restaurants, the mall, ETC. There was something different about him in this setting, something elusive. Is he in town for Game 6 on Friday? Was he back for playoff nostalgia? Has he seen the future? Or did he travel back from the past…Fleer 1987 style? All of these ?’s ran through my head but the main thing I was thinking was…why isn’t he working out at the Jazz Basketball Center? I would assume being the best power forward EVER for a franchise that you basically laid the foundation for would give you some perks even in retirement. Maybe I’m wrong. And no…he did NOT have LA Gears on.
Speaking about the Utah Jazz…
I know there is a difference with you HAVE to win, and you NEED to win. Was it overconfidence, underestimating the opponent, looking ahead to the Lakers or just to much red in the stands? We know you have the physical gifts as a team to beat anybody in the league but do you have the smarts when it matters most to take it to the next level. From here on out it is ALL mental. Love him or hate him, Kobe Bryant and the newly re-energized Lakers NEVER let up on the pedal and IF you end up beating the Rockets you have to “get it” or you will be done in the second round. And again that is IF you get there. The Rockets are a good team and they play HELLIFIED defense. Right now they have that “killer instinct“. The Jazz don’t and the need to find it before it’s to late…Game 7 in Houston would be a Do, Do, Don‘t, OK, Nah, Maybe, or DIE. That’s far from the assassins mentality that we need. Go JAZZ!
These damn things scarred the living hell out of me when I was a kid. They re-ran this show A LOT in the tri-state area. I used to lie awake at night and stare at my door, convinced they were lurking just outside. Looking back, they never seemed that hard to get away from…walk for your life! Get out of my childhood!!!
You will want a break from the predictability of your usual routine and methods. You're in the mood to experiment and to learn something new. Offbeat or original ideas excite you and you will seek people who can offer you a different way of looking at things. Discovery, inventiveness, and spontaneity are major themes now.
...So, it has come out that Michelangelo might have put hidden messages in the Sistine's frescoes. Jewish texts, Angel hand gestures, Kabbalah & Papal insults are said to be embedded in the masterpiece. And if you look close enough you can see a cock & balls...oh wait, you don't have to look that close for that. What's next "The Michelangelo Decalogue"?
A Tribe Called Quest and Nas will headline the increasingly popular Rock The Bells fesitval tour this summer.
Mos Def, De La Soul, Rakim, Pharcyde, Method Man & Redman, Raekwon & Ghostface (Cuban Linx), Immortal Technique, Dead Prez, Murs and Kidz In the Hall, Santogold, Spank Rock, Kid Sister, Jay Electronica, Wale, Flosstradamus, the Cool Kids, and hosts Supernatural and B-Real of Cypress Hill are all also on board this year.
Rock The Bells will hit 10 major North American cities this year, including Philadelphia, Toronto, and Vancouver all for the first time. Check out the complete schedule below.
Sat 7/19 - Chicago, IL Sun 7/20 - Toronto, ON Sat 7/26 - Boston, MA Sun 7/27 - New York, NY Sat 8/2 - Miami, FL Sun 8/3 - Philadelphia, PA Sat 8/9 - Los Angeles, CA Sat 8/16 - San Francisco, CA Sat 8/23 - Denver, CO Sat 8/30 - Vancouver, BC
Studying new concepts is also favored; your ability to understand and abstract ideas and your desire to grow intellectually is strong now. Anything than broadens your world appeals to you at this time. You are interested in the big picture and have less attention and interest in details.
Monday, April 21, 2008
I did my 2008 taxes and I got the smiley face. The smiley face spoke to my better angels and they have told me that…
“If you are in a profession dealing with words, ideas, or communication, this is a very productive time for you. Ideas flow, and you express your thoughts well.”
So I thought I would start emailing some peeps off of KSL and Craigslist and engage in the art of breaking balls…ahem, haggling. I have emailed them with offers for their PS3’s. For the 60-80 gig systems or bundles I have offered $350-$400. For the 40 gig models and accessories…$300. I make it a point to let them know that my offer is solid and I deal strictly with CASH MONEY.
Here are the responses I have received so far. -No thanks. $550 firm. -I really wish I could but I just have to much invested and a lot of people have been going for 450 -I’ll give you a LOL for your offer -I just posted this and would like to see what kind of response i get. I will let you know. I am willing to work some on the price. -Thanks for the offer but there's quite a few people who have called so the lowest I would go would be $500. -How about $390? -Dude, I just watched a 60g without any of the extras sell on ebay for 640. I dont really like ebay and wanted to avoid shipping but the best i can do is 500. -I dont know...thats kinda low...maybe $400 its a deal -the lowest i will take is 375. only because i am giving the extra control, game, and movie. between the movie, control, and game that alone that alone valued at 125. -$450 you got a deal.
…And someone who wants to sell, but is out of state? -Hey, I have not sold the PS3 yet and will sell it to you for 300... let me know! give me a call at *** 616 0266 if you wanna buy it
After the first forty minutes of last night's Democratic debate, it was clear we were watching something historic. Not historic in a good way, mind you, but historic in the sense of being something so deeply embarrassing to the nation that it will be pointed to, in future books and documentary works, as a prime example of the collapse of the American media into utter and complete substanceless, into self-celebrated vapidity, and into a now-complete inability or unwillingness to cover the most important affairs of the nation to any but the most shallow of depths.
Congratulations are clearly in order. ABC had two hours of access to two of the three remaining candidates vying to lead the most powerful nation in the world, and spent the decided majority of that time mining what the press considers the true issues facing the republic. Bittergate; Rev. Wright; Bosnia; American flag lapel pins. That's what's important to the future of the country.
What a contrast. Only a few weeks ago, we were presented with what was considered by many to be a historic speech by a presidential candidate on race in America -- historic for its substance, tone, delivery, and stark candor. Last night, we had an opposing, equally historic example -- and I sincerely mean that, I consider it to be every bit as significant as that word implies -- of the collapse of the political press into self-willed incompetence. You might as well pull any half-intelligent person off the street, and they would unquestionably have more difficult and significant questions for the two candidates. It was not merely a momentarily bad performance, by ABC, it was a debate explicitly designed to be what it was, which is far more telling.
It is certainly true that a case could be made that the moderators explicitly set out to frame even the supposedly "substantive" questions according to GOP designs. The implicit presumption of success in Iraq when, nearly an hour into the debate, the moderators finally deigned to mention the defining current event of this campaign. Gibson, as moderator, lied outright about the supposed effects of capital gains tax cuts, and dogged the candidates over it to a greater extent than any other economic issue: does he really believe that of all the economic challenges facing this nation, the most pressing of them is supplication towards a decade-long Republican bugaboo? Gun control? Affirmative action? These are the issues that are most compellingly on the minds of Democratic primary voters, in 2008? Or were the questions taken from a 1992 time capsule, insightful probes gathering dust for a decade and a half until they could find network moderators desperate enough to dig them up again?
But even slanted questions could be forgiven, of the press; what was more inexplicable was the intentional wallowing in substanceless, meaningless "gaffe" politics. It says something truly impressive about the press that a few statements by a presidential candidate's preacher bear far more weight to the future of our nation than the challenges of terrorism or war. It is truly a celebration of our own national collapse into idiocracy that we can furrow our brows and question the patriotism of a candidate, deeply probe their patriotism based on whether or not they regularly don a made-in-China American flag pin, but a substantive discussion of energy policy, or healthcare, or the deficit, or the housing crisis, or global climate change, or the government approval of torture, or trade issues, or the plight of one-industry small American towns, or the fight over domestic espionage and FISA, or the makeup of the Supreme Court -- those were of no significance, in comparison.
If a media organization set out to intentionally demonstrate themselves to be self absorbed and ignorant, they could not have accomplished it better. It was not just a tabloid debate, but the tittering of political kindergardeners making and lobbing mud pies. It was politics as game show. The moderators demonstrated that to them and their supposed "news" organization, the presidency of the United States of America is about the trivialities of_politics_, which were obsessed over ravenously, not about the challenges of American governance, which were fully ignored.
Certainly, as mere citizens we could ask little of the network that unapologetically brought us The Path to 9/11, a fabricated conservative pseudo-documentary laying the blame for terrorism at the feet of everyone loathed by the far right. But it is not simply ABC that bears the blame: surely, one could expect similar drivel from any of the other networks or cable channels who have so successfully and self-importantly dimmed the national discourse, these past ten years. For his part, the chairman of the written intellectual wisp, the New York Times' David Brooks, marveled at the "excellent" questions:
*We may not like it, but issues like Jeremiah Wright, flag lapels and the Tuzla airport will be important in the fall. Remember how George H.W. Bush toured flag factories to expose Michael Dukakis. It’s legitimate to see how the candidates will respond to these sorts of symbolic issues.*
Indeed, how dare his peon readers whine about these things: this is how the political game is expected to be played by the grand masters of our discourse. Symbolic tours of flag factories! Checkmate! That is the elite idea of "issues" in our national debate. Piss on the war, and screw the economy -- somebody find a goddamn flag factory to tour! That is how our most elite media figures like to see political opponents "exposed" as... well, what exactly? What does touring a flag factory prove, other than the media in this country is so astonishingly gullible, tin-headed and shallow that you can actually tour a damn flag factory and get praised for it by our idiot press as being a bold, disarming move against your opponent?
Truly, we have become a nation led by the most lazy and ignorant. It seems impossible to mock or satirize just how shallowly the media considers the actual world ramifications of each election, how glancingly they explore the actual truth behind political assertion or rhetoric, or how gleefully they molest our discourse while praising themselves for those selfsame acts. And that, in turn, is precisely how we elected our current Idiot Boy King, a man who has the eloquent demeanor of a month-old Christmas tree and the nuance of a Saturday morning cartoon.
It seems impossible, but we may yet have an election season in which we can be in a slogging, five-year-long war, and mention the fact only in glancing asides. We may yet have a series of Republican-Democratic debates in which the most pressing issues of the economy are entirely ignored, so that we can more adequately explore the "patriotism" of the candidates as expressed by their clothing. We may have yet another campaign season carefully orchestrated to leave all but the most glancing and hollow of themes untouched, while our press achieves multiple orgasms at every botched line, every refused cup of coffee, every peddled character assassination or character assassination-by-proxy peddled by the sleaziest of paid dregs. A campaign, in other words, perfectly suited to the bereft, rudderless, and substanceless self-pronounced guardians of our democracy.
Perhaps, if nothing else, it is time to take back the debate process and insist once again on moderators chosen for competence, expertise and neutrality, rather than network or cable network fame. The elites of our press have managed to botch the task time and time again; perhaps it should be left to someone with an actual interest in doing the job.
I heard something about this project several months ago and NO…that isn’t the cover you see there. I have mixed feelings on this. The good…I respect the idea of someone with the musical knowledge and prestige of the Cos coming out against trite ideas and the current state of music in 2008. The bad…basically everything else. This could either be an “Uptown Saturday Night” or a “Leonard Part 6”…or a “Ghost Dad”. In some of the online articles I have seen he is quoted…“I do not rap on any of these things. I wouldn't know how to fix my mouth to say some of the words.” Huh?
So…is it a spoken word-Shatner “Rocket Man“-type of CD? Think Dr Dre meets Dr Huxtable.
I pulled the following off the AP wire… Cosby said the hip-hop music he hears is profane and degrading. His album is “the opposite of what I think is the profanity for no particular reason, the misogyny for no particular reason,” he said. “It really looks at the frustration and the anger that a young man may have.”
And check this out… And though he doesn’t expect the CD to be a huge hit, it won’t be his last hip-hop venture. “We can do even better,” he said. “The next one will be even more cheerleading.”
Cheerleading? Opposite of profanity? Sounds like he is biting the Rotten Musicians approach. The “Narratives” drop in May.
A couple of ?’s to you…1) Who would be the best musical pairings for the Cos (guest emcees, producers?) and 2) What 70’s-80’s comedian should create a musical outing next? My money is on…Chevy Chase or Bill Murray.
Your energy level and your self-confidence are high now. You are full of enterprise and may chaff at the bit if you can not do enough, if your present position doesn't give you enough scope. Also, at this time you tend to overextend yourself or to believe you can do more than you actually can.
Your ability to concentrate on mundane concerns and problems diminishes now. The world of imagination, fantasy, entertainment, or art holds more attraction for you. Go to a movie with a friend (or write your own!). Also, your psychic sensitivity and intuition are heightened at this time. You are more impressionable and open, but somewhat less precise and clear mentally.
Overall, it is a finest week for gains and growth. You should try to take advantage of favorable transit of planets.
Go Speed! I got a traffic violation this morning. 44mph in a thirty zone. To be fair, It was up by Canyon Rim park and I was descending down a hill. He said he tagged me where it crested? It seems I get a speeding ticket like once every three years and usually when I am descending a slippery slope. I hate paying these.
K, Lex and myself caught “Mummies: Secrets Of The Pharaohs” last night at the planet-arium. Since it is a 40 minute mini-film I’m not sure it deserves a HAIKU review. I’d give it a 2.5/5. The Rosetta Stone is in there but they don’t really expand on “cracking” the code of hieroglyphics. They waste WAY to much time on the brothers who robbed the Valley Of Kings and the list of names of the kings. The DNA/Science aspect was tight and I would have liked for them to tie some of it into modern Egypt (Where are you Cairo?) .
First and foremost, the single thing I love the most about Secret Invasion, is that at its heart, the series is nothing more than a large-scope mystery. The story basically comes down to a few basic questions. Who is a Skrull? What are the Skrulls trying to accomplish? How long have the Skrulls been here? This "Who done it?" approach instantly takes the series into a whole new realm of epic storytelling, in which Marvel has not messed with in a long while. Though not nearly as conventional, Secret Invasion is much closer to Identity Crisis than it is House of M. We've been told that Bendis has been plotting this mystery for years now, and this becomes more than evident by issue's end.....and in that regard, it's important to recognize that this legwork is what truly makes Secret Invasion tick.
I bring this up for a very specific reason. Make no qualms about it...what Bendis and the rest of the Marvel crew are doing here is wading out into extremely dangerous waters. The way I see it, this series can go one of two directions. It can become an exciting tale, which holds a couple of huge world-changing revelations, or it can become a disastrous exercise in ret-conning. If there's one thing I hate in the world of comic storytelling, it's the overuse of a bevy of different gimmicks. If you want an increased readership, you simply kill characters off, play with the boundaries of sexual orientations, change a costume, etc. Then you find a way to erase said changes from continuity, and we're all right back where we started (I.E. the “Spidey“ clone saga).
To that end, Secret Invasion places a great deal of power squarely into Bendis' hands. Using the Skrulls, and more specifically their shape-shifting abilities, as a device of alteration, the author can literally change anything that's happened over the last thirty years of Marvel history. The writer himself makes this abundantly clear within the first four pages of the very first issue...as he has Tony Stark sum up the matter in a few simple sentences. "They're here now. Living Among us. Undetectable." The stakes are set very high, very quickly. This means that Captain America could still be alive. Jean Grey could still be alive. Even Iron Man himself might be a Skrull, which would call into question the very validity of the entire Marvel Civil War.
Now, as I stated earlier, after reading Secret Invasion #1, I'm fairly confident Bendis is handling this difficult task admirably. Without divulging any spoilers, there are more than a few clues to prove he wasn't merely grandstanding about having laid the seeds for this story over a long period of time. In fact, I see this issue as a bold statement from Bendis to address this very point, and to ease the worry of those of us doubters who are fearful of scheme and gimmickry. For instance, the single most prominent location in the issue is itself a giant clue about the author's long-winding intentions.
Bendis does more than enough to convince me that Secret Invasion is not simply a continuity fixing tool, Infinite Crisis, but instead the culmination of a story we haven't even realized we've been reading. Having dropped numerous hints over the course of the last four years, Bendis can justify baffling his readership with the basic questions that form the meat of the series. He can take risks, because he's already laid out the logic to defend them.
Not to be outdone, Leinil Yu's artwork is nothing short of outstanding. His characters are cool looking, in a cutting-edge sort of way, but still look decidedly human, as opposed to cartoony. They are stylized, but also fully realized which makes for perfect art.
As far as "events" are concerned, Secret Invasion just feels different. I know that it's way too early to properly judge, as who knows where the story is truly heading, but this first issue felt as rich in character as it did in epic occurrence. The very idea of different personalities debating the proper recourse to handling a faith-busting ordeal, makes for a story centralized not on explosions and cheap thrills, but instead on development of character and human interaction. The situations this could present, the questioning of faith and trust, have the potential to be a thousand times more memorable than any battle, death or costume change could ever hope for.
“Secret Invasion” could be a series fans are talking about for years...for the right reasons.
"The Olympic flame was extinguished three times yesterday and the Paris leg of its round-the-world tour abandoned after the event descended into a French farce."
Bought out by the Chinese authorities? However, India (the country?) states "smooth relay of the Olympic torch will be ensured". This will end well.
Einstein gave hope to scientists chasing the most outlandish theories when he famously declared: "If at first, the idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it."
He then proved the existence of black holes and the notion that time passes more slowly the faster you travel.
Now one of the world's most distinguished physicists has scrutinized some of science fiction's other concepts, such as teleportation and force fields, and is convinced that they too can become reality.
Professor MichioKaku, of City University in New York, has ruled out time travel for at least a few millennia, but believes invisibility cloaks and telepathy could be possible this century.
"So many times predictions are made that certain things are impossible only to find them becoming possible a decade or a few decades later," he said. In his new book, The Physics of the Impossible, published in the UK today, Kaku rates seemingly impossible phenomena according to how likely they are to happen.
Teleportation When Gene Roddenberry was planning the early episodes of the cult sci-fi series Star Trek Paramount studios, who financed the project, said the special effects necessary to recreate ships taking off and landing were too expensive. Roddenberry needed another way to get his characters down onto the surface of the uncharted worlds they were visiting. "He said, 'we'll just beam them onto the planet and save a tonne of money'," said Kaku.
That money-saving decision did much to cement teleportation as the epitome of the sci-fi way to get around, but teleportation is actually already being done by physicists. It relies on a deeply strange phenomenon called quantum entanglement, which physicists have already used to "teleport" a photon 89 miles between La Palma and Tenerife in the Canary Island group. But Kaku concedes that Captain Kirk will have to wait a couple of centuries. "You are not actually moving the photons from one place to another because you are destroying the original. What materializes at the other end is your twin which has all the information of the previous object."
Time Travel The Cambridge physicist Professor Stephen Hawking spent much of his career attempting to prove that time travel is impossible. If it were possible, he reasoned, why have we not been visited by voyagers from the future? But he was forced to conclude that there is actually nothing in the laws of physics that prevents moving in time.
"He changed his mind about 10 years ago," said Kaku, "There was no way to ban time travel from happening. So now he says that time travel is possible, but not practical."
The way it might work would be to take a trip through a worm hole connecting one point in space and time with another. The laws of physics suggest that the intense gravity of a black hole is enough to rip the fabric of space and time, making a worm hole possible.
"What we physicists want to do is create our own wormhole so that if you walk through the looking glass you may go backwards in time," said Kaku. Stabilizing a black hole would require large amounts of an exotic form of energy called negative energy, thought to be impossible. "But we can now make it in the laboratory," said Kaku.
Invisibility One reason why no one has met any time travelers from the future might be, Kaku suggested, because they are able to make themselves invisible. "Invisibility a la Harry Potter's cloak is no longer out of the question," he said. He rates it as the sci-fi technology that is likely to happen soonest. Perhaps the most promising new development is the creation of an exotic new substance called a metamaterial. By eliminating reflections and shadows, it renders an object invisible.
Alien Contact Scientists currently have the best chance in history of making contact with aliens. Although humanity has been combing the skies for signs of life for decades, the search so far has been haphazard. Astronomers have detected around 300 planets in other solar systems, but these are generally large Jupiter-like planets which do not look like a good bet for harboring life.
Satellites will greatly enhance scientists' ability to detect Earth-like planets. "We've only scanned about a thousand stars and that's nothing. We haven't even scanned the stars in our neighborhood," said Kaku, "We hope to analyze a thousand times more data than was collected in all the sweeps of the past. And that's why we are much more optimistic that we will make contact with alien life." He thinks contact with an alien civilization could happen within decades.
Precognition Being able to predict the future is very difficult to reconcile with the known laws of physics. "It would set off a major shake-up in the very foundations of modern physics if precognition was ever proved in reproducible experiments," said Kaku.
The impossible takes longer: MichioKaku's ratings
Type 1 impossibilities Impossible today, but do not violate the known laws of physics. Might be possible this century or the next: force fields, invisibility, phasers and death stars, teleportation, telepathy, psychokinesis, robots, UFOs and aliens, starships, antimatter and anti-universes.
Type 2 impossibilities Technologies that sit at the edge of our understanding of the physical world. May be realized millennia or millions of years in the future: faster-than-light travel, time travel, parallel universes.
Type 3 impossibilities Technologies that violate the known laws of physics. If they turn out to be possible, they would represent a fundamental shift in our understanding of physics: perpetual motion machines, precognition.
You are optimistic and possibly extravagant now. You are less cautious than usual, feeling that nothing can possibly go wrong. If you are inclined to overindulge, overspend, or go to excesses in any manner, this tendency is exaggerated at this time. However, you also aim higher than usual and a very promising opportunity or contact can also occur
You will become practical oriented with physical endurance and perseverance.
