v a l l e j o n o c t u r n o

From an iPhone!

From the NYT:

Mr. Colombo drew the June 1 cover scene, of a late-night gathering around a 42nd Street hot dog stand, entirely with the iPhone application Brushes. Because of the smears and washes of color required by the inexact medium, it comes off as dreamy, not sharp and technological.

“The best feature of it is that it doesn’t feel like something that was done digitally; quite the opposite,” said Françoise Mouly, the art editor for The New Yorker. “All too often the technology is directed in only one direction, which is to make things more tight, and this, what he did very well, is use this technology for something that is free flowing, and I think that’s what makes it so poetic and magical.”

Anagram Hunt

Here are some neat anagrams for "War of Terror" from an Anagram Engine at Wordsmith:

FAR ERROR TWO
FAT ERROR ROW
WAR ERROR OFT
WART ERROR OF
FART RE OR ROW

TimeCube

Are you aware that the MIT Educators were
as criminals for banning student right to
debate Time Cube dooms life. Time Cube
ineffable Truth.Any educator who allows Time
Cube lecture / debate. I am the Greatest
Thinker and the Wisest Human. Dumb
academicians cannot comprehend their slavery to
counterfeit word and its gods. Time Cube debunks
god. Nature outlaws both word and its
barren Earth for children. 4-corner Life is
based upon a perfect math or your arm would
be more inclined to think you are.
Academic and religious teachings equate mental
retardation - as a guest lecturer to inform them
about Nature's Time Cube. Educators are evil
word pedants who enslave childish minds to
a 4 quadrant hemisphere which rotates to
a 1/4 (corner). You are evil word
worshiper.
*********************
Humans are educated stupid.

by TimeCube

I am a Thuggee

A brag from The SubGenious Brag Generator:

I am a Thuggee, I am feared in the Tongs, I have the Evil Nose, I carry the Mojo Bag; I swam *Hell County* and didn't get wet! For I speak *only* the god damn *Truth*, and never in my days have I spoken other than! For my every utterance is a lie, including this very one you hear! I'm the last remaining Homo Correctus, who'll try to gouge with me? I'm a fission reactor, I fart plutonium, power plants are fueled by the breath of my gut; when they plug *me* in, the lights go out in a corporate galaxy! I've packed the brownies of the gods, I leak the Plague from my brows, opiates are the *mass* of my religion, *I bend my genes and whittle my DNA with the sheer force of my mighty *will*!* I'm *supernatural*! Every night I hock up a lunger and extinguish the *Sun*! Now give me some more of...

Adolescent Poetry Generator

From the Poetry Generator:

I am
by The Aggregate Kid

i am like a box a chocolates
you never make me cry the tears
that i could be: should be. but
i’d like to do. i only do this
because, sometimes, dispite my whole
big group of friends, i feel
everyday, the feel of cheat, as i go
through.

i’m all alone in a sea anenamie
swept here by the ocean could not
have her any longer in his hands
i will always stand by you!

to loos if you promise not to
tell, i told you pehaps it would
get worst - didnt listen and
worst came …….. a month now
and always have been trampeled
by them they are known as
nightmares or fears they are pretty and
nice. raining sunshine down and
down my spine the sight of you
and you are satisfied with that.

you have acomplished nothing and
neathier will others but my grip is
loosening from your needless hand
maybe you should know, like hoe we
all have fun and stay all day,
and only love i ask you god to
trust you and me.

Adolescent Poetry Generator

Internet hijacking

From Talking Points Memo, an alert about putting the Internet into the hands of corporate America:

Last week I mentioned that there's a very bad bill moving through Congress. It's supported overwhelmingly by Republicans but also by a lot of Democrats too. Basically the bill would turn over the control of the Internet to the phone companies -- though 'phone companies' is probably now an antiquated phrase for Verizon and AT&T and other such outfits. There's a lot more underlying complexity to it of course. But the change could make it much harder to access TPM or any source of news or entertainment that isn't owned by some big corporation or, more likely, have the inside track with one of the phone companies. If you're cool with AT&T deciding the sources of use you can access then you probably won't mind. But if you like making those decisions yourself, you may want to speak up.

Here's one group mobilizing against the bill: savetheinternet.com.  Another group that is on the case is publicknowledge.org.

This isn't some obscure issue of interest only to policy wonks. It may seem like it, but it's not. It's a very big deal and I strongly encourage you to find out what's going on.

We tend to take for granted how the Internet evolved. For all its shortcomings, it is a remarkably level playing field where all sorts of voices -- the strong and the weak, the popular and the despised -- can all make their voices heard. Yes, Viacom's voice is louder than TPM's or Atrios's or Newsmax's. But if you want to read TPM, we're right here, just as easy to visit as the media giants.

But it won't necessarily stay that way.

The Free Society

Eben Moglen's essay "Freeing the Mind:Free Software and the Death of Proprietary Culture" at Inter Activist Info Exchange covers the difficult issues related to our new digital environment and the easy accessibility of anything digital. Here's how he begins the essay:

The context of the transformation of society from analog to digital means of information transmission posed a threat to the free exchange of information, a threat which you all see becoming tangible around you in every area of life from day to day. Information distribution, from the adoption of movable type printing in the west at the end of the fifteenth century until the end of the twentieth, was an industrial process. Information was turned into physical artifacts that it cost money to make, move and sell. Accordingly, an economy of information distribution arose, which required payment streams to recoup the cost of making, moving and selling physical artifacts containing information. That process came to center around the creation of property rights--through a logic of the raising of streams of payment to recoup the costs of production familiar to everybody--in every branch of Western economic thought. The morality of that process, however, depended on the fact that there was no alternative. Because this form of distribution inevitably resulted in the exclusion of some people from information. Societies, as their wealth increased, tended to attempt to offset that exclusionary effect--the undesired, exclusionary effect--of property rights in information production by socialized measures to ensure access: the public library, the public university, and so on. Thus, by the middle of the twentieth century it had become the dogma of the West that information costs money to make move and sell, that information costs must be recouped by exclusionary property rights (``you may not have this information unless you pay for it'') and that the harshness of coercive distribution of information goods could be ameliorated in the familiar way--by semi-socialized institutions that offset the distributive unfairness of coercive models of information production and distribution. That, in a nutshell, is how to we got to the point at which things threatened to become terrible, because the advance of technology removed the barrier to universal access. But our minds did not change with respect to the paradigms of information production and distribution.