Man. Myth. Morland.

The LA Times demonstrates its mastery of space-allocation by devoting 1685 words to a piece covering the apparently thriving practice of exorcism (login: joansbob - password: 2pr7z95ly).

In the Roman Catholic world, he said, people turn far too readily to exorcists out of desperation when medicines and other therapies don't seem to work.

And in Italy, superstition remains a powerful force. An estimated 10 million Italians — 17% of the population — use the services of fortune-tellers, faith healers and magicians who cast evil spells, according to a 2002 study by the Eurispes research institute. They pay nearly $6 billion a year to about 22,000 purveyors of such wizardry, Eurispes said.

Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, the archbishop of Genoa, said a society bereft of values and moral codes is creating a fertile field for evil in the world.

Bertone recently set up a task force of exorcists and doctors to handle the overload of troubled Italians seeking the church's help, some of them possessed and some of them just "disturbed."

"The devil is real, he is at work, and he is agitating," Bertone said in an interview.

Doctors have proved an important asset in assessing the state of mind of potential patients, Bertone said. Surprisingly (or not), the practice of exorcism gets some endorsement from Italy's medical establishment.

Salvatore DiSalvo, a psychiatrist in the city of Turin, has been counseling priests in how to recognize the symptoms of schizophrenia and other mental disorders. He sees a valuable role for the exorcist.

"Science can't explain everything," he said. "I believe the exorcist is the last resort."

I fervently disagree. Bloodletting and runology have been proven for centuries to be superior forms of healing. Recent medical studies show the application of leeches and/or carving of one's "true name" into the skin result in faster, less painful relief from demonic possession, humor imbalances, and even chronic wil o' the wisp.

This will be the first of many posts documenting my sure-to-be-interesting experience with the Republican convention being held this Aug/Sep one block away from my workplace, at Madison Square Garden. It serves to visually demonstrate the extreme proximity. Image blatantly stolen from Ask Gothamist.

It's now been six years since anyone but yours truly has cut my hair. And it shows. Were I prone to cliche, I'd compile a list of home-spun folksy life-lessons ("snip"-pets?) extrapolated from the accumulated wisdom of these years:

But I won't. Instead I'll point out that at the going Kerry-rate of $1k per haircut, I've saved almost $36,000.

I'd just like to send a shout-out to everyone out there who helped me displace the city of Morland, Kansas as the number one Google search result for "morland". Your gift bags (containing a lock of my hair and some peanut brittle) will be arriving in the mail.

This message brought to you by the "Self-Promotion Disguised as Appreciation Society".

The TI-84 Plus, newest in Texas Instruments' TI-8x series, has launched. The very mention of the line of graphing calculators, the gold standard of math students everywhere, brings back bittersweet memories of hours spent killing class time through programming and tinkering.

TI has the student demographic clearly in its sights - the 84 Plus features customizable start-up graphics, interchangeable faceplates, and a somewhat unsettling overview (PDF) of rhetorical ammunition to convince your folks to fork over the, ahem, $100 plus:

Be patient with them. Remember, this stuff wasn't around when they were in school, so it may take them a little longer to get it.

...

Who could say no to all that? This is an investment in your education we're talking about here, not some cell phone that takes pictures or a portable music player. Think about it. Make it a priority. Tell them to think about it... and to make it a priority.

Odd that they mention mobile phones, another handheld gadget that wants to tempt the youth market with personalized faceplates. Really though, the kids are already sold on this through the surefire cogency of "everyone else already has one".

The first concert I ever attended was a five-hour P-Funk endurance test. I recall a friend on far too many substances involuntarily depositing the contents of his stomach onto the aisle next to our seats. Someone has put together this collection of P-Funk mythology, and it brings me right back to those fun-filled days:

Starchild's nemesis is Sir Nose D Voidoffunk ("Sir Noise Devoid of Funk" from Funkentelechy Vs the Placebo Syndrome (Parliament, 1977)). Inspired by The Pinocchio Theory of Bootsy"s Rubber Band, Sir Nose attempts to end the Funk because he is too cool to dance. He is the master of the Placebo Syndrome, which causes unFunkiness (a combination of stupidity and no dancing). His goal is to place the minds of all humanity into a state called the Zone of Zero Funkativity. Starchild, on the other hand, uses his Bop Gun ("Bop Gun (Endangered Species)," from Funkentelechy Vs the Placebo Syndrome) to achieve Funkentelechy for all humanity. With the Funky powers of the Bop Gun (which are augmented by the Flash Light), Starchild causes Sir Nose to reach Funkentelechy, and find his Funky soul. He then dances away the night.

We all come across, in our daily routines, various strains of esoteria. Sometimes, for reasons unfathomable, we are made painfully aware of just such an event. Today I found out, as a direct result of research at work, that there is an internationally-accepted code to notify relevant services of a traffic incident due to a bull fight (SEA code 1456).

MR. SENOR: On your second point -- or your final question -- I'll let General Kimmitt handle the front end -- we have been told by -- our delegation has been told by Fallujan leaders that many of the individuals involved with the violence are on some -- are on various drugs. It is part of what they're using to keep them up to engage in this violence at all hours. And the Fallujans leaders, the political and civic leaders with whom we've been talking, have repeatedly expressed this to be a serious problem, that the drug use by those engaged in the violence is something that we need to address.

I have it on good authority that these same insurgents also listen to Judas Priest records and are regularly tardy to roll-call. Some of them even smoke cigarettes.

Hey - you can't export a democracy omelet without breaking some drug problem eggs.

Thank god I'm not a writer. Sometimes I feel bad about it, but most of the time it's quite liberating. For example, were I a writer of any sort, I might feel a pang of guilt and regret at having to abort a short story I was inspired to write before completion, even if it were astonishingly bad. But my heart, ego, and paycheck aren't tethered to it, so nip it in the bud I will.

In an act of sheer spite, I present to you this miscarriage of the creative process. If I can deter just one person from putting pen to paper (or finger to keyboard), it will be worth it.

You know those fake songs put out by the labels on p2p networks that have 20 seconds of music followed by intense screeching noise? The joke is that they're treating those decoy songs as cutting edge noise-pop remixes. They're also openly selling a CD compilation of these so called "RIAA-mixes", which hopefully the major labels will try to sue them for.

I'd been seeing photo-mosaics popping up lately, so I thought I'd try my hand at one. A conversational misunderstanding while discussing previous mosaics provided the impetus (Ashcroft vs. Ashcroft - not to be confused with Kramer vs. Kramer). Click for larger sizes.

This was much harder than I'd anticipated. It required the compilation of over 2,000 images pulled from magazine shoots, album covers, concerts, and video footage. The videos in particular were difficult, as frames needed to be screen-captured at one-second intervals and sliced up into individual images. In retrospect, some could argue that it was futile to devote so much time to subject matter in which I have only marginal interest (I respect his work, but there are plenty of bigger fans out there). I would rebut that line of argument with: "Sir or Madam, it was the journey, not the destination." Then I would grin smugly, and go back to reading Chicken Soup for the Soul.

Lockhart Steele brings to my attention the possible construction of a monstrosity across the street from my humble chamber (replacing the old H-shaped school seen in the center-left of this picture). The 23-story dormitory would supplant a cultural center (CHARAS), replacing it with bunk beds and platonic back-rubs.

The really nice bit of coincidence here is that the planned tower would be adjacent to Christadora House (visible in the upper-left of the above picture, mostly hidden behind the sun - top clearly seen here), the only other building over six stories (17 I believe) for many blocks in any direction. But wait, they have more than vertical impudence in common: once a settlement house and community center, Christadora House now contains tony condos. Thus the Tompkins Square riddle:

Q: What's better than conspicuous consumption of incongruent high-rise real-estate?

A: Conspicuous consumption of incongruent high-rise real-estate at the expense of venerable neighborhood community centers!

Really though, making urban renewal jokes is too easy, enough of that. Another serious beef with the proposed structure is its aesthetic disgustingness. How about renovating the existing school house? That's some prime loft space right there, umm hmm, let me tell you what. And the building is congruent with its surroundings. Imagine that.

Argentina's Diego Maradona, one of the most gifted players in football history, remains in intensive care in a Buenos Aires clinic with heart and breathing problems but is stable and improving.

His doctors said in a statement on Monday that his "progress has been satisfactory until now" and that his arterial pressure was normalising. He was still breathing with the help of an artificial respirator.

...

After a similar scare in early 2000 Maradona's entourage initially denied cocaine was involved but his cardiologist later told agonised fans to change their placards from "Hang in there Diego" to "Damned cocaine".

I dressed up as this very man for Halloween last. If you anger me, and consume dump trucks of cocaine, I will garb myself in your clothes and you too will have cardio-respiratory problems. Although really, the hearts in the worst shape will be those of your fans.

It just occurred to me that job placement and dating sites have an economic incentive to offer less-than-optimal (from a consumer standpoint) services, because if they provided perfect matches, they'd be robbing themselves of a large segment of future customers. The blissfully employed and the eternally love-struck are not repeat visitors (unless there's some sort of tragedy, like if your spouse is mistaken for a ibex and gutted).

Dr. Glasses and his steady girl are now betrothed. Six years ago, we sat in her room and finished off two bottles of tequila. Afterwards, I went to a party and when I came back her door was closed. I thought twice about knocking, mostly because I needed to vomit (everywhere - and I did), but also because I was scared of jeopardizing any burgeoning romantic future.

Striking up a conversation apropos of nothing is a skill-set I don't possess. There are dozens of go-to questions that normal, socially-capable people have in their arsenal of small-talk weaponry, whereas I know not where to reach for such an arrow and merely quiver instead (oooh, archery puns).

I can be surprisingly talkative at times, but it requires the flooding of my brain with endorphins to an abnormal extent. Sometimes, all it takes is some sunshine and convivial company. Other times, I have to do self-destructive, dirty things - things I won't be telling my children about.

So why do I have a website where I publicly broadcast my thoughts to the world? Doesn't it contradict my every introverted impulse? On the surface it may seem a pure exercise in masochism (and, if anyone reads it, sadism, considering the quality of what I put here).

A stage actor is different from, say, a television actor. One has to be on point without fail, used to and comfortable with the spotlight, capable of projecting to the distant recesses of the nosebleed seats. The other can use the editing suite as a crutch, need only perform to a camera, and can speak meekly (well... for an actor).

There's a certain fault-tolerance built into the latter profession. There's always time to tweak, over-dub, or even re-shoot. And, not least of all, the audience is unseen. Even speaking to a larger group than you could ever hope to in person, you never have to see their faces. Some reactions trickle back, but those that do are temporally mitigated and manageable - not like the boisterous applause/boos of a crowd (or worse, the chilling silence). It's a nice safety blanket.

So sometimes, even though it's blatant self-delusion, the only way I feel comfortable saying anything is to yell it out into the void and shut the door before anyone can yell back. That way, it's always chilling silence.

My birthday, 1979: I am born into this world.
My birthday, 1980: Things going well.
My birthday, 1981: Again, doing well. Am now an older brother.
My birthday, 1982: Fine, thanks.
My birthday, 1983: All's well. Return of the Jedi was awesome.
My birthday, 1984: Nothing to report.
My birthday, 1985: Staying on target. Conditions green.
My birthday, 1986: There is a great disturbance in the force. Clouds of permanent darkness descend.
My birthdays, 1987 - present: Utter horror.

I knew something changed on June 13th, 1986. My birthdays up until that year were times of rejoicing and mirth. From 1986 hence, that date brought gloom and despair. For almost two decades the reason why remained a mystery. Today that mystery was solved.

Zef was the biggest castrati boxing promoter in the city, but it came at a price. You were only as good as your fighters' last bouts in his line of work, and lately things were falling apart. His last three had ended in draws. Draws. Even bribing that sleazebag of a judge hadn't helped.

It was getting harder and harder to find motivated youngsters willing to... apprentice themselves. Even when they did, he loathed the bloated whales they became.

To make matters worse, he was developing an obsession with The Misfits. A full-fledged, scary preoccupation. It came from nowhere, and he hadn't the slightest inkling why. He'd heard some of their albums back in high school, but that was decades ago. He never went in for their macabre antics, even if some of it was campy fun. But now he couldn't ditch a compulsion to listen to their entire collection over and over.

Glenn Danzig was in his head.

Now with a day's worth of distance and retrospect, I'm going to try and figure out what in the blazes was going on in my head. Clearly this Zef fellow is a thinly-concealed morland inasmuch as he's really good-looking and has women hanging on his every word. The Misfits/Danzig obsession could be seen as a metaphor for my fear of death, but the encounter with the city alderman in the back alley of the brothel speaks to an exacting perversion to which I can't lay claim. I think all the equine imagery (and constant reference to heroin by its slang name "horse") is meant to parallel Zef's rise to power with that of the Roman equestrian class, which was more than a little bittersweet as the republic, struggling to reconcile the ideal of representative democracy with the practical considerations of a senate now forced to appease the swelling ranks of this newly-empowered warrior caste, was forced to metamorphose into an empire. To save its body, Rome sacrificed its soul. Just like Zef.

(You too can name-drop circa-1980 hardcore-punk innovators and Roman aristocracy in a single entry! Just get a blog. Tell 'em I sent you.)

Skilling was at two bars in Manhattan — American Trash and The Voodoo Lounge — where he allegedly ran up to patrons and pulled open their clothes, the source said.

"He was shouting at them 'You're an FBI agent and you're following me,'" the source said.

Well, if you're going to use an insanity defense you might as well go whole hog.

Does this remind anyone of Corrado "Junior" Soprano's attempt to fake his way out of similar federal charges? Of course, he then started suffering legitimately...

:: One pill makes you[r chances of suffering a severe myocardial infarction] smaller

This makes me wistful for the good ol' days when I used to go out at night and party until 5pm the next afternoon, all hopped-up on valium and white wine. Granted, that was only last weekend, but still... does nostalgia have some mandatory minimum gestation period? Isn't this why ESPN came up with "instant classics"?

I devoured science-fiction literature as a child. I had bookshelves full of every kind, from the pulp to the esoteric, the serious to the light-hearted, the no-nonsense accounts that read like technical manuals (emphasis on science, see also: Isaac Asimov) to the trippy dreamscapes that never left the narrator's head (emphasis on fiction, see also: Philip K. Dick).

There were always recurring themes. Drawing from the collective body of work, whether for mere inspiration or wholesale appropriation, is a trait common to both science and art, so it was no surprise that the genre combining the two would piggyback heavily on the shoulders of its own giants. So it came to be that I read repeatedly of artificial intelligence, global virtual reality networks, and of course the colonization of Mars.

I'm not going to tout the prophetic nature of science fiction, because it's been discussed so repeatedly as to have become tautological, but I always thought the Mars prediction was a little aggressive to appear as frequently as it did in the more pragmatic, we-can-do-this types of books. I guess I was being too skeptical.

It probably won't happen in my lifetime, nor the lifetime of my children (er... the clones I will grow in test tubes and raise as my own offspring) but we are taking baby steps every day - and I do think the baby steps (emphasis on science) bring us closer than the grand quixotic interplanetary plans of the Bush administration (emphasis on fiction).

Fire up the space-wagons! Let's bring homesteading to the red prairies of the Martian lowlands. And this time (we can hope), there are no pesky indigenous peoples to impede our progress and then ask for reparations.

In all seriousness, despite being such an erstwhile sci-fi die-hard, I'm not sure it would be the right allocation of our resources for the foreseeable future, but it's an interesting process to watch.

Public servants and businessman talk of political capital. It's no trivial commodity. Properly applied, it can swing legislatures and boardrooms. He who is savvy enough to hoard it until the proper moment will go far indeed.

There's social capital too. It's no less direct, and it's noticeable, sometimes even more obviously than its professional analog.

A painfully typical example: a friend has asked you to help move him/her from one residence to another. You are faced with a quagmire.

Chances are, if you're socially capable enough to have established friendships at some point, you'll help. This is what friends do - behold the nature of altruistic relationships. If your know this person would not terminate your friendship because of your refusal, say because your backside is like that of a solid-granite statue of a Roman god, you may choose to decline his or her request and wallow in your ingrateful selfishness.

In any case, a disparity of social capital has arisen. The asset flows like a precious liquid from one party to another, sometimes diffused outward amongst groups, or concentrated from the many to the one (depending on the ratio of movers to helpers). But human nature abhors this inequality (homework assignment: how can one arbitrage these minute differentials in social capital?). If everyone involved wishes to maintain the social status quo, there must be an equalizer. In my experience, this usually comes in the form of a cold, fermented beverage, but I hear flowers and gift certificates work as well.

So: if you raise capital (help someone move, donate a kidney, cook up phat beats in the lab), others must match it through compensation (beer, backrubs - avoiding the now-sensitive lumbar region, "shout outs" on their latest album).

But this is not always possible. If the person in social debt is unable to equalize the difference through some form of repayment, the socially wealthier individual can voluntarily negate the difference, or risk inducing strain on the relationship. There are few additional options; one cannot easily foreclose on a friends' assets.

Being generous, that is to say raising social capital, takes effort. We humans are generally a lazy ilk, so naturally we've sought out a way to circumvent that effort and reap the rewards directly. As in the moving example above, favors may be asked of friends or acquaintances. The recipient enjoys the benefits and the giver accrues his or her capital surplus. But by placing oneself in a perpetually irreparable state of social debt (pity), the recipient forces his or her social creditor to (at least temporarily) negate said debt or cease the friendship. This isn't to say that reciprocity isn't implicit - the benefactor might have nebulous hopes of being repaid - but in the context of many relationships it can be deferred indefinitely, or at least until the borrower can skip town. Frequently the debt is annulled entirely.

Pity becomes the guard dog which keeps the repo-man away. Pity is therefore a commodity in and of itself.

This, I think, is partly the basis of our fascination with self-destruction. From Munchausen's syndrome to alcoholism, we've come up with no shortage of ways to forestall repayment of social debt. When the celeb du jour implodes on an international scale, we revel in it. The more awesome their immolation, the greater their genius for exploiting this loophole left open by eons of societal evolution. It's the crux of schadenfreude (yes, I know there are other factors at work here - the thrill of seeing a hubristic Icarus get his just deserts, for one... but perhaps arrogance is simply the overestimation of one's status - social wealth - so perhaps even that is merely the market correcting an overextended credit line). Look at all this pity they've come in to! They're no different from the bum on the street, holding a sign that reads "pro-bono favors and donations of social currency welcome".

So next time your friend drinks for 48 straight hours and manages to hit you up for rent money because their hoarse voice can barely make it out of their ulcer-coated throat, remember: it's not a bender. It's a fundraiser.

You can see where I'm going with this: John Ashcroft is unequivocally pro-cancer.

Prodigies scare me, because they tend to be exhibited against their will, or even before they have a will. Case in point: Mo Kin, three year-old xylophonist extraordinaire.

When I watch her, I imagine college freshman William James Sidis lecturing the Harvard Mathematical Club on four-dimensional bodies at the age of 11 with the exact same expression on his face.

The Internet Archive, who brought you the Wayback Machine (for those of you who may be nostalgic, my site is archived) have announced that their repository of concert recordings has exceeded the 10k mark. That's ten thousand shows, all free (for non-commercial use), stored for the most part in lossless formats.

While there's a predictable jam-band bias, some good acts are represented, including the Xiu Xiu show I attended merely two weeks ago. That surprised me, as the show was both very obscure and terrible.

Since 1959, Gravity Probe B has overcome a half-dozen attempts at cancellation, countless technical hurdles and several delayed launches. The NASA-funded, university-developed spacecraft is now scheduled to begin its mission following an April 17 liftoff from Vandenberg Air Force Base, Calif.

This interests me, and not just because the probe uses "four pingpong-sized balls of quartz, the most perfect spheres ever made".

Instead of calling the satellite "Excelsior" or "Prometheus", they just called it "Gravity Probe B". Genius! NASA obviously failed to get their marketing team involved, and that’s A Good Thing.

Push Fluids has re-launched. It's the ileoanal pull-through of the interblogspheroid!

:: How yesterday would have differed were I a voracious but barely functional user of:

Ecstasy - The announcement of Girl Scout cookies in the kitchen prompts me to shower praise upon the coworker who brought them, calling them "a warm, beautiful person" and "true companion". A deep period of introspection then follows after learning it was I who brought the cookies. Repeated trips to the water cooler eventually give way to Molvanian dance party in the smaller of the two conference rooms.

Cocaine - I send out a company-wide email informing everyone that the application I'm designing will "f*cking rule!!!!", and that I'm "aggressively readjusting our development deadline from May 19th to tomorrow, approx 10am". I include a post-script promising that "there's nobody I'd rather go to war with than this group right here". After disappearing for several hours, I am found in the supply closet shaking and insisting that the cleaning people are narcs.

Heroin - An engineer comes around to my desk to inform me that the data-import scheme we devised earlier has some critical flaws. I hoarsely respond that my eyelids are having one thousand simultaneous orgasms before vomiting copiously upon a half-evaporated pile of earlier vomit.

PCP - Overflowing with energy, I offer to help move several people from their current desks towards the front of the office to new stations in the rear. The most logical way I can think to do so involves attaching thick rope to their heavy metal desks and dragging them all, alone, forty feet across the industrial carpeting. This tears my arms from their sockets. When the endorphins kick in, I discover the joy of breaking windows with my skull. After disappearing for several hours, I am found in the supply closet shaking and demanding that the cleaning people stop stealing my thoughts.

Paint thinner - While on a conference call to Seattle I raise what I consider to be a salient point by stating that the project in question "will totally not work until we make the earth stop vibrating." I deftly deflect criticism of this position by noting that the "thinking pulses" coming from the ceiling are superior to those from the floor.

Robotussen - Noticing the drool collecting in my lap, I journey to the back to pick up some napkins. Two intensively time-dilated hours later, I give up at the halfway point, collapse to the floor, and try in futility to scratch off all my skin.

Pixie dust - Lunchtime becomes a phantasmagoric adventure of happy thoughts and fantastic worlds unseen to mortal men - indistinguishable from heroin, but without the heaving.

Soma - I am a happy worker. My job brings me a sense of fulfillment. I am warmed by the prospect of my daily duties. I endeavor to do the best job I can. Life is tolerable and there is little pain. Yay.

Huey Lewis' "A New Drug" - I don't get sick, crash my car, feel three feet thick, develop a headache/cottonmouth/pink eye, become overly anxious or prone to spilling things, blow all my money, have my sleep-wake cycle disrupted, lose my emotional center, start to babble, or develop acne.

April Fool's Day: for every hilarious satire, there's ten uninventive press releases remarkable only for how stupid they make reporters, who should by now have a giant red X on their calendars every Apr 1, seem.

There's word that Kinja will be launching today. It remains to be seen whether this is 4/1 chain-pulling or not. They seemed serious enough when they rejected my application to help out in my off-hours last June, when it was still called the "Lafayette Project" (awwwww... poor wittle me).