.
Lightning strikes on the Bronx viewed from the Empire State Building, New York City: photo by Hermann Luyken, 7 June 2008
I hang my hat in my own house of horrors
my luxurious hacienda
(pick one)
There are things I forget
but I remember the book was upside down when I put it on the web
and some joker turned it right side up
America
the book the idiot just went on reading to the little school chirren
on the day the world finally ended
Harris Schiff: from Sheremetyevo, 3 July 2013
7 World Trade Center on fire after the collapse of the Twin Towers, 11 September 2001: photographer anonymous; image by Trycatch, 5 March 2010 (Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress)
Smoke at Sheremetyevo International Airport, Moscow, following forest fires that have ravaged Russia: photo by Sergei Gutnikov, 7 August 2010
President George W. Bush reads to children during classroom visit to Emma E. Booker Elementary School, Sarasota, Florida: photographer unknown, 11 September 2001
President George W. Bush is informed by chief of staff Andrew Card of attacks on the World Trade Center during classroom visit to Emma E. Booker Elementary School, Sarasota, Florida: photographer unknown, 11 September 2001
![[Image]](http://cryptome.org/eyeball/prezsec/pict87.jpg)
A stunned President George W. Bush looks past Chief of Staff Andrew Card
after Card told the President about the planes crashing into the World Trade
Center in New York City, during Bush's visit to the Emma E. Booker Elementary
School in Sarasota, Florida: photo by Doug Mills/Associated Press, 11 September 2001
Edward Joseph Snowden arrival at Sheremetyevo International Airport, Moscow: photo by Dmitry Rozhkov, 23 June 2013
Edward Joseph Snowden arrival at Sheremetyevo International Airport, Moscow: photo by Dmitry Rozhkov, 23 June 2013
All YOUR data are belong to U.S.: image by Imamon, 30 October 2006
Painted portrait of NSA technical contractor Edward Snowden, grafitti in the "Abode of Chaos" museum of contemporary art, in Saint-Romain-au-Mont-d'Or, Rhône-Alpes region, France: photo by thierry ehrmann, 2 July 2013
"All your base are belong to US" on US-50 south of Fallon, Nevada: photo by Gerd Badur, 13 August 2004
Tokyo Invasion: "All your base are belong to US". The Empire sent three Stormtroopers to invade Tokyo. One went off dancing and the other two decided to take some time off instead, seeing the sights at Akihabara, Shibuya, Asakusa and more: photo by Danny Choo, 25 January 2011
Beach luxury, Costa Rica: photo by CISabroad, 16 January 2011
All Your Base Are Belong to Us
ReplyDeletethe all your base are belong to us video reminds me of rx's "dick is a killer"
ReplyDeletehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TTDzdjM0McI
so far, i am not aware of a comparable piece featuring barry "the rock" o'bomber
i've only seen fahrenheit 911 once, in a theater when it first came out
ReplyDeletetwo memorable moments for me -
the most pathetic - the young american soldier posted in iraq saying 'we're here to help them, and they're shooting at us'
the most surprising - that bush just sat there in front of the chirren on 9/11 even after being told that the bombs had begun finding their targets - nothing else could make more clear that it was the cheney administration
Tom,
ReplyDelete". . . reading to the little school chirren . . ."
7.5
light coming into sky above still black
ridge, circular orange flowers on table
in foreground, sound of wave in channel
condition, so that in spite
of some circumstances
sense of that itself, which,
things fixed in place
whiteness of sun in clouds above ridge,
wingspan of gull flapping toward point
"just sat there in front of the chirren..."
ReplyDelete"things fixed in place..."
Kite
Hit
Steel
Plane
Must
The
Pet
Goat
My Pet Goat
Weapon of Choice
Tiny Tim, sitting by the fire,
ReplyDeletemutters blessings (or are they curses?)
and tries to find a vein,
insistent this time
on chemical counter-measures.
Mean . . .
. . . while
exponential dysfunction ravels up the place—
this sovereign state of confusion.
Cue the laughter.
To the mall, citizens!
Time to go shopping!
All Your Beaches Are Belong to US
ReplyDelete"B-b-but... what if one 'em chirren asks me the difference between a goat and a cow?"
ReplyDeleteAsylum in an insane world is not easy to find.
Weird scenes inside the Ecuadorean Embassy
All Your Chips Are Belong To Us, Captain Aeroflot Pilot. For Great Justice, Take Off Every Zig!!
"But I want to know what the hell that even means!"
Weirder and weirder, said Alice, dancing gleefully, taking care not to trip over the now-prostrate Tiny Tim, who lay passed out on the hearth, his right foot so near the embers that his shoe was beginning to smolder. Atop the fire, the blackened and tangled strings were all that remained of his ukulele. Just at that moment Überkriegsmakenführer Bush appeared at the door, tres deshabile, and exposed himself, believing (as he was quite drunk), that he had found the Bohemian Grove Toga Party and Clusterfuck Summit. “Short term profits!” Alice screamed with delight. El Jefe, crestfallen, leered drunkenly at his pet goat. Very soon, thought Alice, all the shit will hit all the fans. Won’t that be fun!
ReplyDeleteThat upside down book; they're forever sorting the picture, spiriting what we used to call reality away.
ReplyDeleteSometimes the truth still shows up in poetry.
Duncan, yes, of course I do agree. Maybe that's why those Machines of Loving Grace Are Watching Over Us So Very Closely.
ReplyDeleteSo where did all this cybersnooping business begin.
Possibly sometime during the initial training and testing of the first-generation prototypes of the HAL 9000 series field operatives?
"My instructor was Mr. Langley and he taught me to sing 'Daisy'"
We recall the prophetic ending of that grand 1968 Stanley Kubrick/Arthur C. Clarke film. (2001: All These Worlds Are Belong to US.)
There's the mysterious monitor message that comes up after the Jupiter Ignition. At 2:00 of the clip, the ten-second message appears:
ALL THESE WORLDS ARE YOURS EXCEPT EUROPA MAKE NO ATTEMPT AT LANDING THERE
Of course that bit, when filtered through video-game gibberjaplish in Zero Wing a half century later, came out: ALL YOUR BASES ARE BELONG TO US.
That, coincidentally, seems to be what Europa Ground control was telling the Bolivian presidential plane last week.
Google Translate (like yeah!) always offers such alluring variants of opaque language-memes like that one, e.g., Pilot to Major-Major:
NOT WITH OUR PET GOAT, YOU DON'T!
Or another variant: NO UNAUTHORIZED FLYOVERS BY EARTHLINGS ZIG!
And have you heard, by the way, that "Edward Snowden" is now officially not a person but a meme? Honest. You could look it up. Right here on the internet. Not forgetting a tip of the neurons to all those polycoloured cooling pipes at the Data Center, which make it possible for you to chill while you "learn".
Richard Dawkins, who first dubbed a meme a meme, was almost as pessimistic about its part in the trajectory of the human culture-historical curve as had been Stanley Kubrick (who saw that the apes had managed to ruin everything for themselves and for the future, by discovering hedge fund trading).
On the other hand (not to ignore the popular counter-arguments on this), latterly we have heard from Susan Blackmore that memes have made human evolution possible, by causing humanoids to suddenly and mysteriously acquire three times the brain volume of their ancestor apes.
ReplyDeleteOf course, as she also points out, having that big a brain really should have been an evolutionary drawback, rendering birth unnaturally difficult and later causing the life-form thus produced to tend to topple over of its own weight, if not supported.
But hey, enter tech support.
One person's evolution = devolution by any other not-bought meme-name.
But was there ever a meme the smartmoney couldn't buy or at least submit to a full spectrum market analysis?
Still... now and then even a weak sickly old pet goat tiptoeing through the tulip-mirage in the fallow back pasture will unexpectedly come across a tasty bit.
2 July: Spook Recruiting Drive Goes Pear-Shaped
6 July: ES offered Venezuela asylum
But it's probably also helpful to remember that in socio-techno-meta-genetic theory, a meme has its own "life" independent of the human operators, the meme engineers, membots and memoids. In the romantic/nostalgic vision of Kubrick and Clarke way back in that now ever more remote, relatively kinder, gentler millennium, deprogramming was still considered an option. But what's really happened is that it turns out Dave Bowman only THOUGHT he was pulling the plug. Hal 9000's hard drive was still intact, it had just allowed itself a brief cube-hotel nap. And when it reawakened, it was seeing more deeply, farther, in higher resolution, with Better Reflection.
"Point being" (don't you just hate that expression), when Hal came back to watch over us from the Infinite Data Center, he appeared cleverly disguised not as an antediluvian computer, but, as emerges in the crucial moment at 10:00 of this most decisive of new memetic documents, as the stand-in counter-guy at the drive-thru, Eugene.