... which should be a little more interesting to read as summer
begins. Right now, what is there to write about? I'm putting up
the last of the winter fruit (quinces and lady apples; I didn't
get around to getting any bitter oranges, but have a lead on
a future supplier, now), and the last few pumpkins of the season
are drying in the oven. There's a little outgoing drama as I
slowly downsize my involvement in the Webring system, but some
of these stories have a "dog bites man" quality about them. At
this point, who doesn't know that life online is deeply absurd?

At any rate, here are the new (or newish) blogs:



The Green Tortoise and Other Travesties

http://josephdunphy.blogspot.com/

Despite the title, this one doesn't actually have much to do
with the Green Tortoise. The title is a reference to the
strange fact that the "Bad Times on the Green Tortoise"
article seems to be what I'm best known for, online. This
blog will mainly be about Chicago, but don't expect a lot
of local boosterism. There's such a thing as pushing self
esteem to such a point as to induce a radical break with
reality, and on a civic level, I think we're there.



Then there's my miniblog, which comes as part of my Yahoo!
360 profile. You can find that through my Yahoo profile,
or just go directly here

http://360.yahoo.com/cafe_satan

I honestly don't know what that one is going to be about.
Early in the miniblog, I suggest that it is going to
be an opportunity for me to revisit subjects raised in
some of the strange places I've been online, and examine
them without the screaming, but on examination, that really
would not be a good idea. The last few years, post-ePlaya
and post-Usenet have been so relatively relaxing, that I
forgot just how obnoxious those people really were, and I'd
like to make a conscious effort to go on forgetting that.
I've already written about the bizarre incident somebody
told me about, in which there were calls on the Burning
Man board (ePlaya) for the extermination of the world's
Muslim population based on somebody's delusional belief
that he had seen 100,000,000 angry muslim protesters on TV.

What DOES one say to such a thing? One clears one's throat
and goes "I guess that must have been a big screen"?!

The word coming down - and this checks out - is that they've
also been celebrating anti-semitism, that hatred toward
anybody in the sciences who is trained to work at any level
higher than that of "technician" is out in the open, and
at some point, trying to work through a difficulty just
stops making sense. I think that I reached that point with
Burning Man a while ago, and recent events have turned a
firm decision into a decision that I feel good about and
one that, to be perfectly blunt, I'm astounded that I didn't
make long before I ever went to Black Rock.

If you look at Joe Winston's film "Burning Man: Just Add
Couches" in snippets, one sees the kind of imaginative
goofing around that I saw a little of in undergrad, and
I miss it, which I guess is why I went. But take a good
look at the "fifteen minutes of fame" booth, in which
one gets to see the burnies show their wit by dangling
their genitalia in front of the camera and really,
seriously - what could I possibly have been thinking about?
These are not my people, they never were and never could
be. In my deep boredom, I had gone slumming.

While there's nothing wrong with the "creative potluck"
concept or with interactive art, I think there has to
be a conscious effort to seperate these things from the
less wholesome aspects of that drug soaked subculture,
and to achieve that, one needs a radical break. No
desert survival discussions, no culture jamming and
given that we're in Chicago, ahem, no fire. ePlaya, then,
will not be revisited and my mood should be the better
for it. What has the miniblog been about, then?

So far ... I don't know. Honestly, I don't. I just jot
down whatever just grabbed my attention, and I'll see what
it evolves into.



Joseph Dunphy