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I have re-located

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THE CLINIC BY THEODORE STURGEON excerpt

It is night by the lake, the moon is burst and leaking yellow to me over the black alive water and Elena by me. I say, "I go soonly."
She breathe, I hear.
I say, "Tree finish, tree die. Sickness finish, sickness gone. House finish, workmen leave. Is right."
"Don't go. Don't go yet, Nemo."
"Seed sprout, child grow, bird fly. Something finish, something change. I finish."
She say, "Not so soon."
"Bury plant? Tie boy to cradle? Nail wings to nest?"

OFFENSIVE SHIT

http://www.b0g.org/wsnm/offensive/

jesus. after looking at a couple of these pictures, i was sickened. for a span of time, i viewed humans as they truly are, meat. slabs and slabs of meat to be battered, picked at, and taken apart. meat without the spark of life, the soul that animates the flesh. that must be how mendel, saddam, and the countless of faceless bloodthirsty sonsofbitches stretching back into the mire of time must have viewed the human flesh. just a thing to be played with, cheap and expendable. i shudder to think that there are still people like that walking around.

MORE THAN HUMAN

by theodore sturgeon. this is a stunning book about an unexpected development of the human organism.

EXCERPT:

He wished he had sense enough to learn to read.
He left the house without looking back and plunged into the forest. He never returned. The truck stood out in the sun, slowly deteriorating slowly weakening its already low resistance to rust, slowly falling to pieces around the bright, strong, strange silver cables. Powered inexhaustibly by the slow release of atomic binding energy, the device was the practical solution to flight without wings, the simple key to a new era in transportation, in materials handling, and in interplanetary travel. Made by an idiot, harnessed idiotically to replace a spavined horse, stupidly left, numbly forgotten... Earth's first anti-gravity generator.
The idiot!

AND YOU THOUGHT BEING A HORSE'S ASS WASN'T IMPORTANT?

JUST A QUESTION OF STANDARDS

Does the statement, "We've always
done it that way" ring any bells...?

The US standard railroad gauge (distance between the rails) is 4
feet, 8.5 inches. That's an exceedingly odd number.

Why was that gauge used?

Because that's the way they built them in England, and English
expatriates built the US Railroads.

Why did the English build them like that?

Because the first rail lines were built by the same people who
built the pre-railroad tramways, and that's the gauge they
used.

Why did "they" use that gauge then?

Because the people who built the tramways used the same jigs and
tools that they used for building wagons, which used that wheel
spacing.

Okay! Why did the wagons have that particular odd wheel
spacing?

Well, if they tried to use any other spacing, the wagon wheels
would break on some of the old, long distance roads in England,
because that's the spacing of the wheel ruts.

So who built those old rutted roads?

Imperial Rome built the first long distance roads in Europe (and
England) for their legions. The roads have been used ever
since.

And the ruts in the roads?

Roman war chariots formed the initial ruts, which everyone else
had to match for fear of destroying their wagon wheels. Since
the chariots were made for Imperial Rome, they were all alike
in the matter of wheel spacing.

The United States standard railroad gauge of 4 feet, 8.5 inches
is derived from the original specifications for an Imperial
Roman war chariot. And bureaucracies live forever.

So the next time you are handed a spec and told we have always
done it that way and wonder what horse's ass came up with that,
you may be exactly right, because the Imperial Roman war
chariots were made just wide enough to accommodate the back
ends of two war horses.

Now the twist to the story...

When you see a Space Shuttle sitting on its launch pad, there
are two big booster rockets attached to the sides of the main
fuel tank. These are solid rocket boosters, or SRBs. The SRBs
are made by Thiokol at their factory in Utah. The engineers who
designed the SRBs would have preferred to make them a bit
fatter, but the SRBs had to be shipped by train from the factory
to the launch site.

The railroad line from the factory happens to run through a
tunnel in the mountains. The SRBs had to fit through that
tunnel. The tunnel is slightly wider than the railroad track,
and the railroad track, as you now know, is about as wide as
two horses' behinds.

So, a major Space Shuttle design feature of what is arguably the
world's most advanced transportation system was determined over
two thousand years ago by the width of a Horse's ass.

And you thought being a horse's ass wasn't important ??

FEAR AND LOATHING IN AMES

well this is nowhere close to hunter s. thompson's classic, probably because ah'm gonna sum it all up in a nutshell. otherwise i d have a best seller in me hands. *chuckles* yeah right. two friends shared a bday on the same weekend, and we figured we'd join in on the fun. i d say one of the highlights of the weekend was i got to piss on the isu campus. my urine splattered on the sidewalk while drunken revelers milled about. that was the night of the isu cyclones vs. iowa hawkeyes game. shit! there sure were a lot of people there who started tailgating at 6 am, and i m not surprised they didnt stop partying until 6 am the next day. word of caution, three or four packs of cigarettes, two thirty packs of cheap beer, southern comfort, and some fucking nasty irish whiskey(not quite nasty if you need to do some system cleaning the hard way, and by that i mean projectile vomiting. i m glad i was able to get in control of my digestive system before it got to that point, but i dont think the same could be said for one of my friends) doesnt make for a good weekend. well it was a good weekend, but i am still recuperating, if you call lying around like a zombie recuperating. good timing though, cause there is a zombie flick from the video store laying around also. right now, for some reason, my left eye wont stop twitching. arrgh!

MANNEQUINS AND LIGHTNING

should i be ashamed that mannequins at the mall turn me on? is there something wrong with me? they re more attractive than half the women i see at the mall. in my defense, they sure make 'em provocative these days...

upon exiting the mall i smiled when i saw that the day had turned into night. massive clouds had converged into a huge roiling mess, pregnant with imminent fat drops. i got to see the most awesome light show i ve seen in a while, which made me think... could lightning be used as an alternative energy source?

a single stroke of lightning is approximately 1021 watts, and a multitude of those could add up to the 1 to 3 gigawatt, the output of various power generation stations from hydroelectrics to nuclear power. a sort of cloud chamber the size of the uhh, the new orleans conference center, perhaps? clouds could be simulated to produce the negative particles required for the transmission of lightning to the ground. there could be a receiver plate that gathers in the lightning and transfers it to some storage facility.

i admit that my knowledge of power production is meager at most, and that it s probably more feasible in the imagination than on the drawing board. for one, if such a concept is possible, is the power(along with financal investment, labor, etc) input worth the output? on a clear day, sunshine can provide up to 750 watts on a square meter surface. would the lightning input be better, especially if it s possible to stimulate the chamber in a way for lightning to strike at a higher frequency, maybe at 1000 or so per minute?

i still think mannequins are sexy :o

The Road to Dune

He came curiously to the realization that he no longer cared where he was in the universe. He felt that he had lived a preassigned role and come to the end of it without an audience. There should be applause, he thought, but there's no audience. Well-remembered stars occupied their positions in the sky, but they no longer represented directions to him nor could he think of them as signposts. There was merely space all around him laid out against an enormous background of Time. The stars peered past him and through him like the empty eyes of his subject people. They were the sealed eyes of ignorance, always seeking to avoid their responsive status as human senses. They were the eyes from which nothing escaped.
-Paul Muad'dib
The Road To Dune by Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson

This excerpt is a part of the original ending of Dune Messiah, which was edited out for publication reasons. The Road to Dune is a storehouse of treasures, featuring deleted bits and pieces of Dune and Dune Messiah. It gives the reader an insight of the master's thoughts and views at the time. This collection also includes the original notes for an article about sand dunes enroaching a small town in oregon, and the steps taken to harness the problem(a special kind of grass with roots that interlock underground, similar to the growth of mycelium). It is interesting to note that countries smack dab in deserts such as Israel were immensely interested in the innovations made in Oregon, so interested that they sent experts overseas on a fact-finding expedition. This is the very endeavour that inspired the Dune novels.

The Road of Dune also includes the original Dune novel intended for publication, entitled The Spice World, with familiar characters with unfamiliar names. The Spice World was written to conform to the publisher's view of the expected length of a science-fiction novel of the time. Thank god Herbert decided to forge on and write the longest science-fiction novel known at the time, refusing to sell out to the expectations of the time. After over twenty rejections by publishers just because it was too long and too complex, an editor at Chilton (known as the publisher of auto repair handbooks) took the risk and brought Dune into publication. The editor lost his job because of this, but thanks to his insight, one of the greatest novels ever published hit the bookshelves. The Road to Dune also includes four original short stories by Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson. The short stories span the Dune saga, from Dune by Frank, the prequel Dune novels by the duo, and the Legends of Dune, also by the duo. This book is a worthy read if you are a hardcore fan of the Dune novels.

I also have heard that the duo is working on a seventh book, detailing the events after Chapterhouse: Dune, where Duncan and Sheena have escaped into the next universe with the last surviving sandworm, from which the spice flows. I dont know the veracity of this, considering the authors are very busy with their own projects these days, though the thought is nice...