North (2)

Extreme Bullshit

This was the featured obit in the Times:

Barbara Warren, a champion endurance athlete in the over-60 age group, died in Santa Barbara, Calif., on Tuesday , three days after crashing during the bicycling portion of the Santa Barbara Triathlon. She was 65 and lived in San Diego.

Her twin sister, Alexandra Drake, told The San Diego Union-Tribune that Ms. Warren had broken her neck in the fall and was paralyzed from the neck down, breathing with the help of a ventilator, when she signaled, by blinking her eyes and nodding, that she wanted the ventilator turned off.

“She wanted to leave,” Ms. Drake told the newspaper in confirming the death. “No athlete would like to have a life with only their eyes talking.”

Ms. Warren, an Austrian-born psychologist, competed 13 times in the Ironman Triathlon World Championship in Hawaii, a grueling event consisting of a 2.4-mile ocean swim, a 112-mile bike ride and a 26.2-mile run, finishing eight times in the top five in her age group and winning in 2003, at the age of 60. She ran a seven-day race across the Sahara Desert, competed in double and triple triathlons, and with her sister, also an endurance athlete, often competed in bicycle relays, including the Race Across America, in which they took turns riding, covering nearly 3,000 miles in less than 10 days.

In addition to her sister, her survivors include her husband, Tom Warren, the 1979 Ironman champion, and two daughters.

“This is a woman who understood adventure sport and the risks that go with it,” Bob Babbitt, a triathlete and the publisher of Competitor magazine, said in a phone interview Friday. “We all know that when you do this stuff, going 30 or 40 miles per hour downhill with 130 pounds of pressure in one-inch tires, this stuff happens. You do this in a car, and the car hits a rock, no problem. The bike hits a rock, it’s death. We understand that.”

I have known dozens of people who communicated final wishes with eyeblinks, but they died of ALS, not some damn fool endurance freakshow. I also know of someone who changed the world with eyeblinks. He has lived with ALS his entire adult life. His name is Stephen Hawking.

Here's another link. I'm in there. (view with IE)

Yeah, these events are used as charity platforms, and I saw two ALS nonprofits on the Ironman(tm) recipient rolls. So what? Get real.

The Nice Guy

kunst und mittel Amerika oder "lumpkinproletariat"

• Dramatic Overtures The World's Most Honored Music Longines Symphonette Society
  
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Reader's Digest Music SKU: 77482
Discover a musical escape destined to lighten your days and sweeten your nights.
A rich musical tapestry of classical, film, folk and new age favorites, Symphony of the Senses will calm your mind, body and spirit… and fill you with renewed energy, warmth and hope. 72 best-loved masterpieces from the world's greatest composers.

* Rhapsody In Blue
* The Merry Widow Waltzes
* Love Theme from Romeo & Juliet
* William Tell Overture: Finale
* Tara's Theme from Gone With The Wind
* The Evening Bell
* Adagio for Strings
* Unchained Melody from Ghost
* More

I will not speculate as to why these material culture artifacts exist, except to state that the Franklin Mint is not too far away, and has not collided with matter, and released two 511KeV gamma rays. But wait, there's more..... WHAT IF a golden melody, one of the selections from your collection of EVERY CLASSICAL MELODY YOU'LL EVER NEED was to be given the "Switched-On Bach" treatment, that is to say, turned into electronic music a la Walter Carlos, who now goes by the name of Wendy Carlos, due to a sex change operation? Well, the immortal "Pavanne" by Gabriel Faure has been converted to a MIDI file and passed through the S-D3.01, an UNFINISHED, BUT WORKING hybrid (FM and subtractive) software synthesizer of my own design, programmed in SYNTHEDIT.

click here

Where Is Spoon River? (1)

click here first

Due to America’s historic and present-day cultural diversity, I may be going out on a limb to speak of the American “psyche”. Nevertheless, I will assert that the current, self-woven fabric of the American psyche is being ripped apart by diametrically opposed forces inherent in its weaving. 

On one hand, our mythologized, historically ingrained desire for, and idealization of, the values of independence, mobility (both geographic and social), “rugged individuality”, bravery, and self-reliance has been,  paradoxically, satisfied and intensified by the destructive forces of unprecedented technological change and extreme social dislocation that occurred during the horrific twentieth century. 

On the other hand, in response to the above-mentioned destructive forces, an equally strong, mythologized desire for social continuity, familiarity, communal but family-centric activities (both social and economic), nurturing, and conformity has been manifested. These desires have given rise to a desperate need to belong to a place-specific but time-independent safe, idealized “community”.

This community, or “small town”, is located temporally in an ill-defined mythological and nostalgic agrarian past, and located geographically in New England, the Southeast, or the Midwest. Exploring the forces driving American urbanization and the resulting disappearance of interpersonal and economic bonds characteristic of “small” community life presents a complex topic beyond the scope of this essay.

 
Indeed, the great majority of 18th and 19th century Americans lived in small, stable communities that existed over many generations, as a walk through an older, non-urban church cemetery will confirm. Examination of economic and family records suggest these communities were cemented together by blood and social interdependence. The decline and disappearance of “small town America” is coincident with the end of the “Pax Britannica” during the first decade of the 20th century. The ensuing fifty-year world war, of heretofore-unseen savagery, was fueled by technological advances and extreme social dislocations. The final demise of small-town American life may be dated to the creation of artificial “small-town” communities such as Levittown, NY in the mid-1940s and universal availability of instant communication by telephone, radio, and television by the early 1950s.




Obtaining an answer to the question: What was it like to live in a small American town “back then”? is problematic. History is written by the victors, and is of limited use in the study and interpretation of vernacular culture, which deals with the story of the vanquished. Therefore, capture of unprocessed recollection or narrative is critical to preserve the stories of people ignored by historians. Collection of these data is left to folklorists or enthusiasts operating at the fringes of academia. 19th-century small-town recollections are unfortunately beyond the range of individual human memory. Recollections of early to mid-20th-century small-town life will invariably be colored by the above-mentioned mythology and nostalgia, because this was the time period of rapid urbanization, cataclysmic societal change, and social fragmentation. Study of material culture artifacts is useful, but provides at best equivocal interpretation. Perhaps useful answers to the question: What was it like to live in a small American town “back then”? may be found in art, specifically, in literature. Certainly, not in journalism posing as literature; the small towns of Agee and Evans’ “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men” (1941) are a nightmare vision of a dying social order. Alternatively, fiction exemplified by Anderson’s “Winesburg, Ohio” (1919) or drama exemplified by Wilder’s “Our Town” (1938) could provide more “truthful” information. But I think the essence of small-town America may be expressed by a combination of poetry and music.

The Agony of 10 msec....

Hope

"You know my situation, which could be a matter of weeks, or months before the wheel runs off. Nobody likes to run out of time. But it's not nearly as great a tragedy as Hiroshima, or the millions of people blown to hell in a war that could be avoided. Those are the real tragedies in life. What's happening to me and Woody are just mistakes of nature, things that eventually someday will be overcome."....Cisco Houston

Cisco and Woody Guthrie
cancer and Huntington's disease



Huddie Ledbetter
Leadbelly
ALS (Lou Gehrig's disease)




1st US drug for Huntington's disease wins approval
RICARDO ALONSO-ZALDIVAR – 2 hours ago

WASHINGTON (AP) — Federal regulators on Friday cleared the first treatment approved in the United States for Huntington's, a rare inherited disease that causes uncontrolled movements, deterioration of mental abilities and, ultimately, death.

Scientists Discover Major Genetic Cause Of Colorectal Cancer
Main Category: Colorectal Cancer
Also Included In: Genetics; Cancer / Oncology
Article Date: 15 Aug 2008 - 6:00 PDT

About one-third of colorectal cancers are inherited, but the genetic cause of most of these cancers is unknown. The genes linked to colorectal cancer account for less than 5 percent of all cases.

Scientists at Northwestern University's Feinberg School of Medicine and colleagues have discovered a genetic trait that is present in 10 to 20 percent of patients with colorectal cancer. The findings strongly suggest that the trait is a major contributor to colorectal cancer risk and likely the most common cause of colorectal cancer to date.

Scientists Create Stem Cells From Lou Gehrig's Disease Patients

August 1, 2008

In a stem cell research breakthrough, scientists have reprogrammed skin cells from two elderly patients with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis -- also called ALS, or Lou Gehrig's Disease -- to act like stem cells.

Brave New SportsWorld

I watched about one minute of the Olympics opening ceremony. I thought I heard Leni Riefenstahl beating on her coffin screaming, "Let me out, I have work to do!" After one minute of exposure to womens' beach volleyball and the Brave New SportsWorld that NBC is ramming down our throats, I decided to make a photostory about reality. I doubt that a world society based on this manifesto is where I want to live:

"Olympism is a philosophy of life, exalting and combining in a balanced whole the qualities of body, will and mind. Blending sport with culture and education, Olympism seeks to create a way of life based on the joy found in effort, the educational value of good example and respect for universal fundamental ethical principles."

Triumph of the will, and strength through joy...

Images from all over the net, music by Copland.

...Pointed a Watergun at Us...

click here, then click on cartoon