When you read the word vigilante it probably conjures up self-appointed killers toting guns and stubble to a firing grave.

Or some comic book character superhero slash badass judge, jury, & executioner.

But not a crossing guard.

In Taiwan, I first laughed when I saw a volunteer traffic cop wearing the word VIGILANTE as a translation fail.

But no sooner had my smug comfort with the word vigilante and the Judge Dredd meme settled in the calcite canyon of cultural egocentrism, then the ineffable sparks of empathy, envy, and bewilderment forged a new understanding out of the baffling ashes of laughter.

Why assume volunteering for a police function should involve killing? Probably because Americans are riddled with guns and assume the cultural value of a police force translates to STALK not WALK.

Skyhooks are a reality. A rebuttal to Daniel Dennett.



In China, the old men hang out in the park all day. As an old Chinese man, it's pretty amazing you made it to old age, given the sieve your government uses to weed out the risky from the maybe risky to the probably not a risk but what the hell, totalitarianism über alles. So you beat the odds and survived a paranoid brutal state apparatus, a civil war, Japanese invasion, the Cultural Revolution, the 100 Flowers Campaign, the 2nd 100 Flowers Campaign, modernization, innumerable deaths from accident or negligence, and entropy in general, you've now got two options: chess or kites.

I love watching the old guys play chess, flanked with an avid audience, shouting recriminations and tactical narratives like a square dance with meta-algorithms. Carpeted with tea leaves and topped with a plume of smoke that never leaves.

But the smoke gets a bit much. So you find yourself with a row of old men wearing metal harnesses, staring at the heavens. They fly homemade kites that are quite small, but sturdy fabrications of chopsticks and garbage. They look like ladybugs. They launch their kites by hooking onto another's line and riding it up for a bit, then jerking their own string, setting their kite free. It's so friendly. So neighborly. Like the only part of communism that is actually true. The only bit that didn't get fucked up or corrupted. And those kites fly!

They are tethered to metal harnesses and large spools that house thousands of feet of high tensile string. The kites are so far far away, they are hardly even specks in the vacuous sky. Some are completely invisible to their tethered owners. But it's not about the kite. It's about the line. That ineffable force pulling at you from the heavens. Like a backscratch from god. Or a high five from the sublime. Something that makes you feel grounded and connected to the universe. A message from beyond that doesn't say much — doesn't have to say much, just, it's ok, you're not alone.

Image: Orangutan Foot by Lisa Roet

epic pisses, an isomorphism of the arc of kings
you start off destroying whole bouroughs of ice-networks
highrise igloos crumble and fall
your piss is a liquid lightning bolt codenamed Zeus
and you're on a mad rampage

like the early campaigns of King William I, your relief is ruthless
then you start to lose turgor and you begin concentrating your attack on one particularly well-fortified ice fortress corner of the urinal
you are making good headway and then unfairly
ignominiously your pressure drops
you only have a few seconds of ammunition left
and you want to leave a mark
leave a legacy
what do i have to show for all my manly streamdom?

if only that last block of ice would fall,
like some negative entropic Rube Goldberg contraption the whole thing might just give in
but no
it holds
and your last drops fall in vain.

you panic. think quick. you spit but it has no effect.

you retreat your cock back in your pants in defeat
then it strikes you.
"Hahaha! I'll show you Ice Land!"
you grasp the flush lever and begin flushing water down on the ice which is somewhat less efficient but still melts a lot of it away. you are giddy with giggles, laughing maniacally with success so near

then the management comes in and, quite baffled, asks what you're doing.

"It's ok, I'm almost done."

That ice is there for a reason sir.

Impossibly you try to translate the barbaric propaganda reel that was playing sweet victory marches in your head just now...

Insanity has always intrigued me. I'm not talking about existential crisis management insanity, or wicked concert sound system insanities. I'm talking about Full Blown Delusions, like the thought that we are merely a holographic gimmick in a 2 dimensional universe. Or, perhaps, still crazier, that we are not.

Just the other day my mind leaped quite effortlessly (one small step for man) to the probability that I was not real. I was just sitting in bed surfing the web, and the computer kept alerting me that I was not connected to the internet. I didn't really try to rectify the problem, as I was somehow connected. But the thought did present itself, that I was hallucinating the whole experience. Not the alert, but the rest.

Why the jump to nonexistence? "Dynamic routing signal" didn't pop into my head. "Packet overload delay" was nowhere to be found.

Occam's razor was not available when I needed to cut through the overgrowth of my own delusions. If we could hardwire that backup meme, a safety meme, the fuse of all memes, to chime in at our wildest, craziest, most depraved moments, then maybe there wouldn't be as many Charles Mansons and Jim Jones in the world.

RUN-DMCSS
htEMINEMl
2.0 PAC
MySQLL-Cool-J
NWAjax
http-Diddy
Eazy E-mail
Grandmaster Flash CS 5.5
Common Lisp
Notorious B.I.Gmail
CooliOOP
L'il WAN
EPMDRAM
ICQb
DMXML
NAS
Fif-TFT Cent
Xzibitrate
Java Rule
Dr. Dr802.11a
OutboxKAST
Master P2P
DJ Jazzy .gif

The Gödel hypothesis: 120061121032061062032121061120

Arguments for Gödel's existence: April 28, 1906 – January 14, 1978

Why there almost certainly is no Gödel: April 28, 1906 – January 14, 1978

If there is no Gödel, why be good? (Incomplete)

After Henis fell into my lap, this post just wrote itself. Ax Club (with a most unsettling coat of arms) and Unicorn boxers are providing me with enough humor to reenter the world of undergarments. The universe provides limitless dots of synchronicity. Asia connects them into a cocoon loom like spiders on acid.

I quit wearing underwear 16 years ago when I contemplated the roots of its medieval function. Underwear had its heyday in the middle ages of Europe when baths were taken on a monthly basis and one's choice of trousers were of the binary persuasion (i.e. zero or one). In this post-Elizabethan-Victorian-Edwardian-Modern era of Paul Ellis, Jordache, and Calvin Klein, it is not only irrelevant, but completely redundant to wear underwear.

Airtight philosophical arguments such as these were circulating my memesphere when I moved to a SE Asian tropical rain forest. The relative humidity, typhoons, and surprising pyjama couture conspired to banish underwear from my wardrobe.

Reminiscent of Santa Claus, a 2-party political system, or Milli Vanilli, I felt like I was being duped. Underwear was a throwback to an earlier time of simple choices and rude metaphors. Underwear was suddenly archaic and perversely inappropriate, like Christianity. Or theatre in the time of moving pictures. Or AM radio in the time of FM, or FM in the time of the internet. Or TV in the time of the internet. Or newspapers in the time of the internet. Or racism in the time of the internet. Or CNN at any time.

But like the new spate of 3D films, bangs, or fascism, the anachronistic garment argument waited patiently for a time to strike out into the world again. Having just gotten a new job, wearing a tie and dress pants to work has thrust me back into the underworld of redundant wares. Real job = real clothes + underwear. The first week felt like someone was constantly punching me in the balls. The second week was an exercise in origami asshalf wedgy debugging. Then, like totalitarianism, it was fine. Pointless excessive bondage from freedom in exchange for an illusory scrap of security, you win.