Tiny, exposed brick apartments in New York mean that one day I might save enough money to buy a dust bowl far, far from anyone else and dump one of these on it.

I want my house to come on the back of a lorry. And fuck the ocean scene. Industrial complexes and their accompanying waste are what I call an interesting view.

More Santiago



South Street Tower

Calatrava's latest, the Palau de les Arts in Valencia is just gorgeous.

I know he's been getting the old slagging of late (why do we always feel the need for this?) but I still loves me some Calatrava.

A week into doing this apartment hunting thing in NYC and I wise up. It’s all about the laugh. It’s called fucking with the brokers. It’s best when you don’t have one yourself and you go ahead and bid directly to the seller’s. It goes like this:

7th phone call of day from seller’s broker.

“But you know that your offer is really low.”
“Yup. I do that. I made it especially so that it would be below the ask.”
“You know another one sold there in September for $XX”
“Right. That was in September.”
“There are other people interested.”
“I am sure there are. You need to realize that I will pass board approval. I am well employed, can put down the down and have no pets or attachments.”
“You know this really isn’t open for negotiation.”
“So why you talking to me?”
“Would you like to see some of my other listings”
“Sure, sweet cakes. Send me an email.”

Hormonal

I think I must be. I am being hassled by a credit collection agency with respect to an invoice from a clinical laboratory which I have already paid. They sent me one invoice to which they also referred as "final".

What I want to say:

YES PAID, you sarcastic, bug-eyed (so I imagine, anyway) bitch. It has been paid and CASHED, you asshat. I know all this because I can print the check from my bank account which has nice pictures of lots of stamps that the clinical laboratory’s bank made when it sucked the funds out of my Citibank account through its teeth. The sound a Jamaican makes when he/she is a little pissed off. That sound. So no more eye-rolling calls from you about mailing checks. You got it. Don’t call me again and don't even remotely think about fucking with my credit history or I will cut you.

The city Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, which is tracking the health of 71,000 people exposed to Sept. 11 dust and debris, said last week that it is too soon to say whether any deaths or illnesses among its enrolled members are linked to trade center exposure.

But Robin Herbert, who directs a medical-monitoring program at Mount Sinai Medical Center for more than 14,000 ground zero workers, said "certainly it is not inconceivable" that a person could die of respiratory disease related to Sept. 11.

Within 7 months, 3 September 11 workers die

It's strange, I got a Christmas card from the WTC Health Tracking Registry yesterday. Didn't get one last year. Maybe they are subtly telling me this will be my last.

The Sick Rose

O rose, thou art sick!
The invisible worm
That flies in the night,
In the howling storm,

Has found out thy bed
Of crimson joy,
And his dark secret love
Does thy life destroy.


William Blake



I think I am with Burnett on the real meaning of this one.

Mirror Neurons and the Brain in the Vat

By V.S. Ramachandran

A fascinating article in which Rama asks:

Lets advance to a point of time where we know everything there is to know about the intricate circuitry and functioning of the human brain. With this knowledge, it would be possible for a neuroscientist to isolate your brain in a vat of nutrients and keep it alive and healthy indefinitely.

Utilizing thousands of electrodes and appropriate patterns of electrical stimulation, the scientist makes your brain think and feel that it's experiencing actual life events. The simulation is perfect and includes a sense of time and planning for the future. The brain doesn't know that its experiences, its entire life, are not real.

Further assume that the scientist can make your brain "think" and experience being a combination of Einstein, Mark Spitz, Bill Gates, Hugh Heffner, and Gandhi, while at the same time preserving your own deeply personal memories and identity (there's nothing in contemporary brain science that forbids such a scenario). The mad neuroscientist then gives you a choice. You can either be this incredible, deliriously happy being floating forever in the vat or be your real self, more or less like you are now (for the sake of argument we will further assume that you are basically a happy and contended person, not a starving pheasant). Which of the two would you pick?

Naturally the answer to the above is the combo brain with Gates' cash.

It's long but really worth it and manages to throw some good stones as evolutionary psychology.

"We are all merely many reflections in a hall of mirrors of a single cosmic reality (Brahman or "paramatman"). If you find all this too much to swallow just consider the that as you grow older and memories start to fade you may have less in common with, and be less "informationally coupled", to your own youthful self, the chap you once were, than with someone who is now your close personal friend. This is especially true if you consider the barrier-dissolving nature of mirror neurons. There is certain grandeur in this view of life, this enlarged conception of reality, for it is the closest that we humans can come to taking a sip from the well of immortality."

Don't Cry Daddy

But seriously though. It's not a big secret that Apple were changing to Intel chips. I'm a techie fucktard and I wouldn't have bought one until the swapover timeline was released. As long, of course, as all new models come in silver.

It's a good move but hardly pantshitting exciting like the previous State of the Nation announcements from Apple. Four to five times faster is always welcome (yeah really) but what I really want to see is Jobs' abs. I have the hotts for him big time.

One question: What happens to Apple overstock of the models with the pre-existing wheel of death?

Also, Steve, does this mean that a 12 inch powerbook will now weigh less than twenty pounds? Don't be all James Frey. Put the battery in your showroom models. When mine arrived in the mail with the enclosed lead weight referred to as a battery, I almost wrote to ask you to Random House me.

Mama San taught me well

The countdown has started.

A shrimp from my salad lunch dissolved in my mouth like a piece of o'er ripe stilton. And I swallowed it.