600-Pound Woman Dies After Being Surgically Removed From Couch

"Using planks, they loaded the woman on to the trailer, still attached to the couch. Removing her would be too painful, since her body is grafted to the fabric. After years of staying put, her skin has literally become one with the sofa and it must be surgically removed." (Via Chapel Perilous.)

I have a nightmare dystopian vision of incidents like this becoming relatively commonplace, like liquor-store robberies.

"Literally become one with the sofa." Can you imagine the logistical problems this raises for the mortician?

Triangle UFOs -- Theirs or Ours?





"Robinson says, 'We're trying to find out whether we're dealing with new technology from the military or whether there's something else going on.' It should be noted that triangle-shaped UFOs have been seen regularly over the last 60 years, so all of them can't be secret military craft."

I wonder. Do we coexist with a civilization that's possessed "antigravity" for hundreds or perhaps thousands of years? Again, I feel the Extraterrestrial Hypothesis is somehow lacking, although I can't articulate exactly why . . . Certainly, "black ops" projects account for some of the triangle reports -- probably most. I rank the flying triangles as one of the most disquieting aspects of the contemporary UFO enigma.

The Borders signing went well. It was a slow night but I managed to attract some impulse buyers (and talk myself hoarse about Mars in the process). One couple, who'd heard me on the radio, bought multiple copies. Very nice. And I got free coffee.

Simon & Schuster had sent Borders a two-foot styrofoam-backed glossy poster of the book cover, which now resides next to my lava lamp.

Two odd, foreign-looking men visited me today.*

"Well, by now you've got it figured out," said the first one, helping himself to a seat.

"Got what figured out?"

The two men exchanged a knowing glance. "Surely you realize," said the second man, still standing, "that there's, well, something different about you."

"You feel out-of-place, like you don't really belong here," offered the seated man helpfully.

"Well, I think everyone experiences something of the sort--"

"Lay off the existential rhetoric, Tonnies," the seated man said. "Face it. You don't relate. You read weird books. You don't like Bush or Kerry. It's time to face the facts."

"I really have no idea what you're talking about," I said, flustered.

"Oh, but you do." The standing man smiled as I fidgeted. "Tell me, Mr. Tonnies: Does the term 'UFO' mean anything to you?"

"Well, uh, sure. I mean--"

The seated man shot a quick confirming glance at his counterpart. "Thought so," he said.

"Thought what, exactly?" I said, increasingly perturbed. "Just say whatever you're here to say and get the hell out of here."

"Mr. Tonnies, you are an alien from outer space." The seated man let the last two words hover in the air as he studied my face, waiting for a reaction.

"It all fits," said the other man. "The preoccupation with cosmology. The weird books. Your anomalously high capacity for caffeine. That rambling book about Mars you wrote."

"That weird blog of yours," suggested the seated man. "Every minute detail of your life leads inexorably to the same conclusion. You can deny it if you wish. But in the end you will find your efforts are futile."

TO BE CONTINUED...?

*This is, of course, entirely made up.

Russian Researchers Say Debris of Alien Spaceship found in Siberia

"The scientists claim that they found remains of an extraterrestrial technical device that allegedly had an accident in Siberia in 1908."

This smacks of Russian tabloid journalism, especially considering Pravda is covering the same story. If the investigation discussed here is bogus, I sincerely hope a real scientific investigation is carried out sooner or later; there's circumstantial evidence that the Tunguska explosion really was caused by an intelligently controlled craft. (Yet another theory maintains it was caused by one of Nikola Tesla's directed energy experiments.)

Bruce Sterling and Rudy Rucker wrote a short-story about the Tunguska explosion ("Storming the Cosmos") that I should probably reread. It's in Sterling's "Globalhead" collection.

Alien message 'may be in our DNA'

"But Davies believes it is wrong to assume that extraterrestrials who may be hundreds of millions of years ahead of us technologically will have chosen to communicate by radio."





I devote some of "After the Martian Apocalypse" to exactly the same possibility; how much of our so-called "junk" DNA is molecular white noise? Could there be a genetically encoded message we've missed in our haste to discover interstellar radio transmissions? More excitingly, is it a "signal" we can biologically activate and express?

Sea engulfing Alaskan village

"Soon this entire village will be relocating to the mainland - making the people of Shishmaref the first refugees of global warming."

They won't be the last.

Audio tape may solve JFK mystery

"Leslie Waffen, an archivist at the US National Archives, believes digital analysis could be used to remove such extraneous noise as static and distant voices to reveal how many of the sounds were gunshots."

My favorite JFK assassination theory: JFK was killed because he was about to disclose the truth about alien visitors.

Song of the day:

"The Promise" (The Cure)

"Nobody carries wallets anymore. I mean, they went out with powdered wigs."

--Kramer

Another reason radio-based SETI has failed thus far: Alien civilizations develop devastatingly funny and addictive television shows and spend their too-brief existence watching them on DVD and endlessly quoting the main characters.

Chances of aliens finding Earth disappearing

"Frank Drake's point, made at a SETI workshop at Harvard University on Friday, is that television services are increasingly being delivered by technologies that do not leak radio frequencies into space."





I suspect that one of the many reasons we haven't received an irrefutable ET signal is because some -- perhaps even all -- advanced alien civilizations upload themselves into custom-tailored virtual universes, effectively leaving this one behind . . .

Of course, this isn't to say that we're not inhabiting a virtual universe. In fact, I think there's an extremely good chance we are. That might also explain why the universe doesn't behave as SETI theorists would prefer.

(Thanks to Jason for the lead.)

The Race is On: Second Private Team Sets Launch Date for Human Spaceflight

"A second team of rocketeers competing for the $10 million Ansari X Prize, a contest for privately funded suborbital space flight, has officially announced the first launch date for its manned rocket."





It occurred to me that Posthuman Blues is quite possibly the only blog devoted to Things Like This that hasn't yet carried this story. Looks like I need to have another discussion with the MTVI staff.

I have to agree with Sauceruney -- this newfangled rocket looks like a rough ride, whereas SpaceShipOne has style. I do like the idea of launching from a balloon, though.

I just wrote a really, really short as-yet-untitled short-story. It's about the Roswell crash. Here it is:

Some short bald guys build a time machine so they can go back to 1947 and view the Roswell crash in person. The time machine crashes.

*ba-da-BOOM!*

Is anybody out there?

"The search for life in space has always been the stuff of sci-fi books and movies. But CNN's Miles O'Brien leaves the make-believe behind and examines the real science behind the quest. Studying environments from the harshest deserts of Earth to the far-flown depths of space, scientists are looking for that elusive sign that we are not alone."

Oy -- a computer could have written this. The language (look at the headline, for god's sake) is embarrassingly quaint: the usual regurgitated fluff that passes as science journalism whenever extraterrestrial intelligence is involved.

Will someone in the mainstream media please think for him or herself and contribute something original to the SETI debate?

I am sick to death of politics. I don't even enjoy "The Boondocks" anymore. I want to grab the main characters by the necks and yell: "You think you're smart? You think you have some claim to elitism because you see through the Bush administration? You're wasting your young lives! It's fiction! Do something creative for a change instead of offering snide comments about the talking heads on TV!"

What Dreams Are Made Of

"This, then, is the essence of dreaming -- reality and unreality in a nonsensical, often mundane but sometimes bizarre mix. Dreams have captivated thinkers since ancient times, but their mystery is now closer than ever to resolution, thanks to new technology that allows scientists to watch the sleeping brain at work."

I tried to link to this a while back but MSN would have none of it for some reason. Thanks to Peter A. Gersten for the URL.

Marsapalooza tour extended!





It looks like I'll be journeying to New Age mecca Sedona, AZ this January to speak about a place with a curiously similar name . . . This is just what I needed: an excuse to get out of the Midwest. I like Kansas City, but lately I've felt something like Jim Carey in "The Truman Show," confined by inflexible barriers. It's good news for my book, too.

Moreover, Sedona is something of a UFO hotspot with an apparent history of weird phenomena. My kind of place.

Details later.

Prozac 'found in drinking water'

"A spokesman for the Drinking Water Inspectorate (DWI) said the Prozac found was most likely highly diluted."

Well, then there's absolutely nothing to worry about. After all, it's "highly diluted."

Meanwhile, back on Planet Earth: What the fuck is a potent commercial psychoactive drug doing in the water supply? I can imagine several scenarios, and none of them are exactly cheerful.

Could this be a government experiment of the MK ULTRA variety? I'm serious. Perhaps it's not as overtly heinous as doping unsuspecting citizens with LSD or performing unsolicited lobotomies, but there would have to be a concerted "national security" interest in something like this.

Or maybe it's simply corporate greed -- what better way to get an entire country conditioned to "need" expensive SSRIs than force-feeding them in small, "highly diluted" dosages?

Say "no" to drugs, kids -- except the ones your government puts in your drinking water.

Mothman Photo?

"I had seen a fast flying low altitude 'object' around 8 feet long. The interesting feature was a 'twin tail', like a swallow tail. I immediately thought 'Mothman?' I did not see red eyes or other colour, just the dark profile against the night sky of something large with a narrow tapering twin tail feature that could be scooped back wings. No noise was heard even though the 'object' was only around 45 metre's [sic] away."

No, it's not proof of anything in particular. But it's kind of creepy.

I still haven't seen the Richard Gere movie, by the way. I somehow doubt it could improve on John Keel's book.

I'm doing a signing at a Borders this Wednesday. My hope is that people will actually have had time to read the book by now and will show up in vast numbers.

Where and when:

Borders, 12055 Metcalf Avenue, Overland Park, KS 66213

August 11, 2004, 7:00 PM

You Don't Know Dick: The Odd Cult of Philip K. Dick





"Dick wrote many science fiction novels -- too many, and far too fast. This was typical of SF writers during the mid-twentieth century, pressed by economic realities and the low paycheques of the least prestigious genre in literature (not forgetting westerns and romances, not forgetting even pornography). Some of Dick's books were written in as little as two weeks. Once he hit his stride, so to speak, he was able to simply churn out one potboiler after another. That he was only one of dozens of American writers doing this -- and the situation doesn't seem to have changed -- is the reason science fiction was and still is so derided." (Via The Anomalist.)

Jim Keith, in "Saucers of the Illuminati," makes an interesting point about the simplicity of the quintessential alien face. Could it be, he wonders, that abductees' brains manufacture the same predictable alien visage because the encounter experience is devastatingly weird, crammed with unfamiliar visual cues? Conversely, the minimalist alien head may be be due to a scarcity of visual information; the abductee's mind may "fill in the blanks" to give a face to something essentially faceless.





Some ufologists have noted that the eyes of the commonly depicted "Gray" alien would be anatomically impossible, if spherical like human eyes; there simply wouldn't be enough room in the skull, no matter how outsized. It's worth recalling that an ostrich's eye is actually larger than its brain.

Then again, the familiar ink-black "eyes" may not be eyes in the familiar sense. They could be convex lenses -- a sort of alien "heads-up" display, maybe. In any case, the excessively stylized alien face so common in the media is almost certainly an exaggeration, a caricature. Our brains seem wired to embellish the unfamiliar.

John Shirley's blog is my number-one favorite blog of all time. I have yet to miss a post. (Read this one, for example.) Shirley's blogging output has a compulsive, unforgivingly topical quality. He's outraged, and he should be. You are not alone.

Woman continues search for aliens





"Outside a country home several miles west of Duluth, Pearce, 23, unveiled an experimental machine she hopes can detect, attract or even communicate with alien life forms. With a little camping gear and a group of adventurous friends, Pearce is spending the first half of her weekend monitoring her awkward apparatus, equipped with colored strobe lights, low-powered lasers, a radio transmitter and a series of gauges said to track atmospheric changes common to extraterrestrial encounters." (Via The Anomalist.)

Somewhere, Jill Tarter is rolling her eyes at the above news item, completely and deliciously unaware of the irony.

Has cell phone blogging found its place?

"'We're adding location to blogging, something that's really never been done before,' a WaveMarket representative said."

But is location necessarily what the blogosphere wants? For many computer users, the appeal of online interfacing is a sense of anonymity. Broadcasting one's "meatspace" coordinates might be a little intimidating -- at least at first.

Forget Bush vs. Kerry -- I'm excited about the potential uses for photovoltaic television panels.

It's no longer possible to escape the clutches of The Election. Pictures of Kerry, pictures of Bush, each looking as Patriotic(tm) as humanly possible. The tension mounts. Remarkably, it seems a growing number of people think Kerry might actually win, or at least has a sporting chance.

Quite honestly, I'm apathetic. I think The Election is a monstrous phildickian distraction. I actually suspect we intuit, deep within the collective American unconscious, that Bush will remain in the White House. Note that I didn't say he would "win" -- simply that he's not going anywhere. The zeitgeist simply doesn't have room for Kerry; he will be industriously discarded and forgotten like a contestant in a particularly grueling "reality" TV program.

That's why I'm not spending any of my time reading political weblogs or attempting to analyze campaign strategies or quoting lengthily from the mass of inflammatory partisan literature that dominates bookshelves.

The Election is pseudoreal, illusory, a bit of postdemocratic theater.

But you already knew this.

Disappearance of Eels Worldwide Puzzles Scientists

"The eel population has undergone a 30-year decline all over the world, and no one can put a finger on the cause. David Sommerstein of North Country Public Radio reports on how the decline is affecting fishermen on Lake Ontario, who depend upon the eels for a living."

I haven't yet listened to the audio, but a few thoughts come to mind. Some eels are electric, right? In light on the Missing Homing Pigeon Mystery, perhaps the eels are not so much missing as simply lost, unable to orient themselves because of the planet's unstable magnetic poles.

Of course, when species get "lost" in the wild, they die because they're cut off from their normal diet. This could be a brief prelude to an ecological domino effect; species that rely on the magnetosphere for navigation wander off, never to be seen again . . . pretty soon, those oceanic "dead zones" the American press has been so good at ignoring grow exponentially larger. Then everything starts dying, seemingly out of nowhere -- an ecological 9/11.

So by all means keep on pouring that mercury into the water supply. I love a good game of chicken.

I really like the Nissan 350Z. It's one of the relatively few cars out there that looks like it actually belongs in the 21st century.

Endangered species board 'frozen ark'




Earth v. 1.0


"With some 10,000 species listed as in danger of extinction within 30 years, the ark will fill quickly. The project will be guided by the World Conservation Union's red list of threatened species, which deems 1,000 as critically endangered and 33 species as already extinct in the wild."

I think it's time to seriously consider making a "backup copy" of the entire planet. Locations for such a backup are plentiful. (And yes, I'm partial to Mars.)

Recently Blogger has been making a big deal about its new, improved WYSIWYG interface. My complaint: I already had a nice WYSIWYG editor, which inexplicably vanished as soon as Blogger launched the "improved" version. This instigated a series of emails with Blogger technical support, who seemed puzzled at first, but ultimately recommended that I upgrade to a new version of Windows.

Could my computer really be that old? Actually, it is; I got it in 1999, making it downright pre-millennial. In fact, it's due for some maintenance (it's still under warranty), so I'll have to force myself to part with it for a couple weeks in the near-future. Which means using my laptop -- which means relinquishing an actual mouse in favor of that clumsy little touch-screen.

The last time my machine was serviced, they replaced everything. Unfortunately, neither of my new CD drives ever worked. Hence my reluctance to have it "repaired" again.

In an ideal world, I'd be running a Blogger spell-check right now . . .

Wow. Check out these mind-boggling organic forms. It's amazing to me how closely many of them resemble engineering works. I bet Haeckel was a peripheral influence on H.R. Giger. (Via Beyond the Beyond.)

Stepping on Big Brother's Toes

"'We are seeing a race to the bottom, where government and private sector alike compete to provide the most intrusive services in the most unstable environment for privacy,' said Davies. 'The proclaimed need for protection of children and the fight against terrorism is often shamelessly used as the pretext for privacy invasion.'"

What's Happening In Kansas

"Since renouncing their populist saviors in 1896, Kansans have anesthetized themselves against the resulting blight by relentless religious indoctrination. In their curious world Jesus loves everyone except homosexuals and Democrats. Anything that happens is 'God's will,' thus logically absolving everyone from responsibility for their actions, yet somehow there remains a concept called sin, which requires the free will that no one is supposed to own. They believe that their god will protect them against any danger, yet they tremble in constant fear of the ungodly. In a decision that threw their state back a full century in intellectual development, creationist Kansas legislators banned the teaching of evolution a couple of years ago."

I can laugh smugly because I live in Missouri, ten minutes from the Kansas border. But I'm afraid the infection has spread way beyond geographical barriers. The entire Midwest is a vast stew of self-righteous bores.

Even the relatively urbane Country Club Plaza is regularly besieged by religious nuts. For example, a month or so ago I saw a woman lugging a life-size cross down the sidewalk. Nothing new there; Jesus impersonators have long become part of the weekend landscape here.

But this particular cross had actual wheels jutting from the bottom. You know, like airport luggage. As unwitting metaphor, the Cross On Wheels very accurately sums up "What's Happening in Kansas": the unimpeded infantilization of the American mind.

There's a Segway store opening where the boarded-up carcass of F.A.O. Schwartz now stands; will I soon see gyroscopically assisted cross-wielding idiots trucking across town?

Soyuz to the Moon?





"At first glance it seems unlikely, even preposterous, that a Soyuz spacecraft could be sent to the Moon and back. However, with the right approach, and the right additional hardware, Anderman believes that 'every Soyuz launched to the ISS is a potential lunar spacecraft.'"

Sign me up!

Greenland ice-melt 'speeding up'

"Now, amid some of the most hostile conditions anywhere on the planet, Carl Boggild and his team have recorded falls as dramatic as 10 metres a year - in places the ice is dropping at a rate of one metre a month."

Eye of the hurricane, listen to yourself churn.

Justice Department attempting to remove public documents from libraries

"Last week, the American Library Association learned that the Department of Justice asked the Government Printing Office Superintendent of Documents to instruct depository libraries to destroy five publications the Department has deemed not 'appropriate for external use.' The Department of Justice has called for these five public documents, two of which are texts of federal statutes, to be removed from depository libraries and destroyed, making their content available only to those with access to a law office or law library." (Via Boing Boing.)

That John Ashcroft . . . What a guy, huh?





Speaking of Boing Boing -- Rudy Rucker's guest-blogging.

The bulbous wound on my ceiling finally split open. It looks like a flap of chalky, mummified skin, or the work of gestating xenomorphs.

Beneath Antarctica's ice lies mysterious Lake Vostok





"To planetary scientists, the hidden lake may be an earthly model for conditions they believe exist on some of the moons of Jupiter -- in particular, the warm-water ocean that is thought to lie beneath the thick and fractured icy crust of Europa, the intriguing moon that the Galileo spacecraft first explored as it flew past four years ago." (Via The Anomalist.)

Stealth Cell towers and the 2004 U.S. Presidential Elections

"Being a curious person I investigated, and discovered to my great surprise that 'stealth towers' are being hastily erected throughout the country, by the thousands. Camouflaged microwave and cell phone towers are being disguised as cacti, palm trees, church crosses, rock formations, water towers, and pine trees. This is happening without any of the dissent or protest usually surrounding cell tower erections." (Via Surfing the Apocalypse.)

Disaster at sea: global warming hits UK birds

"Hundreds of thousands of Scottish seabirds have failed to breed this summer in a wildlife catastrophe which is being linked by scientists directly to global warming."

I'm reminded of canaries in mines serving as early warning devices . . .

I'm August's guest presenter for Paraview Media Guide:

"If you haven't been introduced to author, essayist, and blogger Mac Tonnies yet, then it's about time. Mac's After the Martian Apocalypse, about Mars exploration and artifacts, was just released by Paraview Pocket Books and has received praise ('A stunning survey of the latest evidence for intelligent life on Mars,' said Herbie Brennan, while David Jinks said 'Tonnies' approach to the complex and heated debate over extra-terrestrial artifacts is masterful in its simplicity'). His website is loaded with intriguing ideas, book reviews, and artwork, and his blog, Posthuman Blues, contains that and more (it promises 'Hot Memes Daily'). This month, Mac guest-edits our monthly media guide and shares the popular science books, Morrissey CD, and films that inform his worldview."

Not one word about Martian spiders!

Fractal World Gallery (via Chapel Perilous).

Fractals are more than just way-cool psychedelia; they're schematics for cognition.

The Moravec "bush robot" meme is gaining ground; in Ken MacLeod's "Engine City," we're introduced to spiderish aliens whose limbs/digits continue branching until they're the size of molecules. Organic bush robots? Why not? By the time we build a bush 'bot, our definition of "organic" will have significantly mutated anyway . . .

My apartment needs a new look. I still like the ubiquitous weird postcards, but I want to move on, reinvent . . . actual framed art would be nice. There's a killer decorating store down the street called Z Gallerie; they have a mind-boggling stock of really cool prints. Of course, they're incredibly over-priced.





I have a few "nice" things to work with: a reasonably stylish black up-lamp, a rather industrial-looking futon; an androgynous life-size glass head from Pier 1; the obligatory lava lamp (with tripod "rocket-ship" fins); rock specimens from an alleged UFO crash site in New Mexico (not Roswell -- another one). And then there are the knick-knacks: glow-in-the-dark aliens; plastic dinosaurs; King Tut; Mr. Peanut; the Mars Pathfinder mission ensemble . . . On a bookshelf, diminutive injection-molded astronauts diligently inspect an omnipresent layer of dust.

Meanwhile, my wall and ceiling have succumbed to an engagingly organic-looking decay as leaking rain moistens the plaster, causing it to swell into strange shapes. The paint traps most of it in blisters, which are subject to uncontrolled growth. One of them has grown quite large in recent weeks; it looks cyst-like, something from a David Cronenberg movie. I half-suspect it will rupture noisily at any moment.

The inside of my main closet is actively disintegrating -- a whole chunk of wall is easing out of place like the lid of a horror-movie coffin, announcing its emergence with the intermittent patter of plaster on videocassettes and obsolescent computer hardware (which I've since moved).

I've told the management, so I assume they're going to come in and basically re-do the entire north-facing wall. They could have spared themselves the trouble if they'd actually fixed the roof-leak the first time this happened, but I don't exactly blame them for not wanting to tackle this at the source. I imagine the ensuing confrontation will be the remodeling equivalant of Sigourney Weaver single-handedly storming the hive at the end of "Aliens."

I saw M. Night Shyamalan's "The Village" yesterday. Man, I hope this guy can keep them coming: He's living proof that horror movies need not be formulaic or childish. "The Village" is possibly his best yet; it begs a second big-screen viewing.

Cool site of the day: Make Your Own Bush Speech