The night before trash day in suburbia rarely brings such exciting visions as this Duchampian fountain on my neighbor’s curb. A tremendous storm–the first rain in many weeks–had just passed through, and the porcelain sparkled as if some great wet mythic meteorological Tidy Bowl Man had scoured everything clean.
In suburbia, on the night before trash day, the only sight more gratifying than a commode on the curb is three commodes on the curb:
The storm knocked over one of the toilets, shattering porcelain all over the road. The remaining johns stood silently by, two smooth white sentinels keeping watch over the night.
This last photograph below is a bit of a time lapse thing. Perhaps a bit too poetically, I titled it Never Returning, the Spirits Depart the Fountain. I don’t know what it means. Then again, I don’t know what three toilets on the street mean either. Dave?
Jack Balkin over over at Balkinization says it best:
As for Mr. Gonzales, he was a disgrace to the office. There are many roles he could have competently filled– and did fill– in his career. The Nation’s chief law enforcement officer was not one of them. He abused his office for political gain, repeatedly misled Congress under oath –and probably out and out lied on more than one occasion– and turned a once proud institution of government into an object of deep suspicion.
While others are wondering who Bush will appoint as the lame duck Attorney General for the next year, I am wondering how the growing exodus from the White House will unfold. Who will be next to flee the sinking ship that is the Bush administration?
This firetruck is a Melissa & Doug puzzle our son used to play with.
I was staring at the puzzle the other day, in an odd moment of nothing to
do. And it dawned on me that perhaps one of the firemen is a little too
happy?
Now, I’m not the kind of person inclined to see a phallus in the Washington
Monument or genitalia in a whiskey advertisement, but I couldn’t help
but thinking that in another context this fireman’s body language might
be read a bit…uh…suggestively?
I’ve written before about the creepy interrogation manual the CIA issued in 1983 on “Human Resource Exploitation.” The precursor to this manual is the infamous Kubark report, written in 1963. This CIA document outlines various coercive and non-coercive methods of gathering “counterintelligence information” from uncooperative sources. Over forty years later, some of the coercive techniques remain uncomfortably familiar: electric shock, self-inflicted pain, and sensory deprivation in a cell (or even better, confinement in a “water-tank or iron lung”).
But even more disturbing than the interrogation techniques Kubark teaches is the report’s tone.
Kubark is written with a sense of humor.
Consider the page here (larger image), excerpted from a section on “Techniques of Non-Coercive Interrogation Methods of Resistant Sources.”
This page details an interrogation tactic that taps into the deep psychological need to feel intelligent. Kubark explains, “continued questioning about lofty topics that the source knows nothing about may pave the way for extraction of information at lower levels.” Quite simply, ask the subject questions he couldn’t possibly know the answer to. And then, when the interrogator asks something the subject probably does know the answer to, he’s more likely to answer. After being asked impossible questions (often questions which highlight the subject’s low rank in his organization’s hierarchy of command), the subject often experiences a “tremendous feeling of relief…when [the interrogator] finally asks you something you can answer.”
Now where do I see the humor? Look at heading of this section: “Spinoza and Mortimer Snerd” — two examples of lofty topics that the victim presumably knows nothing about.
It’s supposed to be a joke, but there is a serious disconnect between the material and the gratuitously obscure allusions in the heading.
Especially when you consider who Mortimer Snerd is.
I’ll admit–I didn’t know myself. My first thought was just as incongruous as the CIA’s little joke: Wow, now that’s a great name for a rock band.
A quick search revealed two things: first, that Mortimer Snerd was, alongside the more famous Charlie McCarthy, one of the characters of the great puppeteer and ventriloquist Edgar Bergren; and two, that in the seventies Mortimer Snerdwas the name of a small-time rock band — supposedly the first Kiss tribute band, in fact.
Now that’s trivia worth being tortured for. But should the CIA ever come knocking at my door, at least I now know the answer. Now I just have to figure out who this Spinoza fellow is.
A while ago I posted a few pics of my cereal box wall. I still occasionally come across a cereal box worth photographing, even if it’s not in wall form. Here is “Organic Wild Puffs”–one of the trippiest cereal boxes I’ve ever seen. (Click the image for a larger version.)
Decorated in faux-Aztec imagery, the box suggests a cereal that is part Fruit Loops, part mescaline hallucinogen.
And the box admits as much: not only is there a play on the word puff, there is also a play on the idea of addiction: the cereal is “habitat forming.” (The company donates a percentage of profits to the National Wildlife Refuge Association.)
In DeLillo’s White Noise, Jack Gladney calls cereal boxes “the only avant-garde we’ve got” in America. Looking here at the drug references, quetzalcoatl icons, and vivid coloring, I’d say he might be right.
, Jack Gladney calls cereal boxes “the only avant-garde we’ve got” in America. Looking here at the drug references, quetzalcoatl icons, and vivid coloring, I’d say he might be right.