Stung Eye

The eye of the bee holder.

About | Archive | RSS

Favourite Drug:

Anticipation

Pieces of Eight

Hi Mom,

No worries 'bout the 3 emails. Enjoyed your declaration of health.

The past few weeks have been very musical.

Highlights of the Oxegen festival were The Prodigy, and The Streets (UK hiphop). Green Day mainly played their slower, ballad-ish tunes. I enjoyed their faster, more rambunctious numbers. It was interesting how they played up to the anti-Americanism present in the Irish youth, denouncing Bush and whatnot to great cheers.

Camping with 10s of thousands of people was interesting - I think there were 70,000 during the day. The Irish kids were a friendly bunch, a bit too fond of the drink me thinks. ;) Were many pirates Irish, because the accent lends itself well to "argggg" and "matie"?

The Guinness tasted different, smoother.

The U2 concert was a powerful experience. When we arrived at the ArenA two long entry queues had already formed; we were 4 hours early. Our attempts to sneak into the line failed. ha! I'm surprised that we managed to get so close, considering our place in line. The Dutch crowd was very polite in the "pit," we stood near the front barricades and had room to jump, sway, and stretch.

Bono dedicated one song to Theo Van Gogh and Pim Fortuyn, and later called on the Dutch to lead the world in terms of Christian, Muslim and Jewish coexistence.

(Note that the Pim Fortuyn article on Wikipedia, like many others that mention Islam, is marked with a neutrality dispute.)

I'm off to AH for groceries.

Love,
K

Dad Will Dig

From Language Is A Virus:

***

Last Saturday we went to an Electro party at the 301 Overtoom squat (or ex-squat?).

"Squatting is the act of occupying an abandoned or unoccupied space or building that the squatter does not own, rent, or otherwise have permission to use. Squatters often claim rights over the spaces they have squatted by virtue of occupation, rather than ownership; in this sense, squatting is similar to (and potentially a necessary condition of) adverse possession, by which a possessor of real property without title may eventually gain legal title to the real property. [...]

Besides places to live squats are often socially interesting places, hosting give-away shops, pirate radio stations, (often vegetarian or vegan) restaurants."

Squatting @ Wikipedia

There is a long history of squatting in The Netherlands, and throughout the rest of Europe. In Amsterdam their are squatted restaurants, bars, internet cafes, and of course apartments.

Despite political pressure and police evictions, there are a few remaining squats in Canada and the US.

***

On Thursday we'll take a train to Eindhoven and then fly to Dublin for the Oxegen festival.

Some of the acts I'm excited to see (in no particular order):

Devil of a lake

From my friend Claire:

The Devil's Lake water diversion project is scheduled to open on July 1st. When it opens, water will flow from Devil's Lake in North Dakota, into the Sheyenne River, which joins the Red River and flows through Manitoba into Hudson Bay. [...]

Canada and Manitoba have been asking for review of the project by the International Joint Commission, which administrates the Boundary Waters Treaty, but so far the United States has not agreed.

By going ahead with the Devil's Lake Outlet without proper assessment, North Dakota is endangering not only the downstream environments of North Dakota and Manitoba but also a long-standing, internationally acclaimed environmental agreement.

Claire has created an online petition to push for further review of this project, and is working on a "one stop shop" for Devil's Lake diversion information.

Inform yourself, and sign the petition if this project concerns you.

More information from Friends of the Earth:

You would think the state of North Dakota would give us better birthday present than this.

All in the family

My sister has joined the blogsphere: JustDazzle.Com - the blog of a 25 year old Canadian girl living and working in Amsterdam.

I based the design of her site off a blogger template, but the backend uses MovableType. If your browser has problems rendering the site, drop me a comment including your browser name and version.

***

Friday Diversions:

Tolerance?

We are borg, and we love it. Seriously, when do we get NetMindLinks?

Ask.Metafilter.Com:

***

Hijab (in various levels of 'modesty') influences the dress of many women in our neighborhood. HeadScarves are worn by a majority of the check-out girls at the SupperMarket across the street. You wouldn't know it living in my 'hood, but tension is rising between the Dutch and their immigrant Muslim population.

Activists within the Amsterdam gay community have begun to blame Muslim immigrants for the rising number of attacks on gay couples. Others see Islam as a threat to so-called 'Dutch Tolerance'.

Meanwhile, many Dutch are being less than tolerant towards Islam.

The Dutch-Muslim Culture War
Seven months ago, Hirsi Ali's implacable campaign against what she views as Islam's oppression of women prompted a Muslim fanatic to ritually slaughter Theo van Gogh, her Dutch collaborator on the film Submission. The murderer used his knife to affix a five-page letter to the corpse promising the same treatment for Hirsi Ali and another Dutch politician who has criticized Islam. The murder sent Dutch society into paroxysms of rage and fear, sparking dozens of attacks on mosques and schools.

[link]

Related:

Little Indiscretions

StructuredThought, has been restructured as a WikiWikiWeb.

Unlike blogs, which are linear expression mediums (posts are displayed in chronological order, time/date stamped, and sorted by day/month/year), a WikiWikiWeb will allow me to grow the site not only in content, but in complexity.

I'll be exploiting JeremyRuston's TiddlyWiki to solidify and explore thought, through pattern, language, and connections:

A TiddlyWiki is like a blog because it's divided up into neat little chunks, but it encourages you to read it by hyperlinking rather than sequentially[...] I think that TiddlyWiki represents a novel medium for writing, and will promote it's own distinctive WritingStyle. 
[link]
 
WikiFact: Wiki software originated in the design pattern community as a way of writing and discussing PatternLanguages. 
[link]meta!

There is no point to this project beyond the indexing of fanciful ideas.

KnowBug: Certain versions of IE won't render images in TiddlyWiki. So GetWithTheProgram. ;)

Climb Trees

The Harvest

The year I began to say vahz instead of vase, a man I barely knew nearly accidentally killed me.
[link]

Change This

We're on a mission to spread important ideas and change minds.
[link]

Algorithmic Composition

Here, the algorithmic process is used in a creative context so that users can convert sequences of numbers into sounds.
[link]

Goalsetting 101

Goal setting is the laying out on paper of the experiences you wish to have, the possessions you wish to own, the places you wish to go to and the people you wish to meet. The emphasis is on the experiences.
[link - Ignore the horrid background image.]

A New Way of Walking

Artist-explorers called psychogeographers are changing the way we experience the city.
[link]

But Not On You

It is raining inside the room, except where you're standing.
[link]

The Ten-Percent Myth

It's the old myth heard time and again about how people use only ten percent of their brains.
[link]

Tabbed Mario

Play Super Mario like a guitar tab.
[link]

Who me?

Alive and well in sunny Amsterdam. (Sunny Amsterdam -> Oxymoron?)

I'm working on a new look-and-feel for structured thought, my poetry and prose blog, and I have some Proce55ing sketches in the works. Also under development: blogs for my sister and mother.

Shannon bought herself a Minolta Maxxum 50. As far as low-cost auto-focusing SLRs go, it's dope.

We have some friends in town. Why don't you plan a visit too? :)

3.14159265[etc]

My mom read Life of Pi again.

Netdigging for Yann Martel's boy and tiger on a boat tale:

I am not a very good book reviewer[, ...] these days I approach a new novel with the cynical gaze of an old card shark[. ...] I simply squint my eyes and ask, [...] "So - do you know any tricks I haven't learned yet?" — Nicholas Carvan reviews Life of Pi as a weathered writer wanting wonder. [his blog]

[...] Moacyr Scliar wrote "Max and the Cats" about a Jewish youth who survives a shipwreck and shares his life boat with a panther. [Yann Martel's] novel, "Life of Pi," [is] about an Indian youth who survives a shipwreck and shares his lifeboat with a tiger. — When is Something Plagiarism?

***

Mom also requested some non-commercial literary site:

Bookslut - Reviews and literary editorials. [They blog too.]

The Complete Review - 1408 book reviews and counting.

Galleycat - Nathalie Chicha's blog about books and publishing. [Pre-Galleycat, Nathalie's blog was very active.]

Moorishgirl - Laila Lalami's blog features literary news, commentary, book reviews and author interviews.

***

We've gathered together thirty of the best spoken word samples from some of the greatest books of all time and the finest actors around. Now they're yours to play with. — Remix Penguin

***

Update vrijdag 20 mei 22:08 - a Galleycat challenge:

We've listened to five mixes now, and so far we haven't heard one that makes a point of mixing texts, instead of mixing text & music. We want a text duet, a word collage, a mix that doesn't utilize recorded readings as lazily as drum loops. Readers, we know you can do it.