#285

Saw on Slashdot, reported in Nature but unconfirmed on other news sites: a UK laboratory has accomplished the use of quantum technology to perform an accurate underground scan outdoors on live dirt to image an existing tunnel. I have been waiting for this watershed moment in sensor technology since I was a tiny child, feeling instinctively and coming to know intellectually that the complete fossil record will only get us partway to where we want to go, let alone digging for it. Also, scan tech is just fucking cool as hell. I am cautiously but giddily excited. The times, man! To have been alive for the past thirty years, and, I imagine, the past fifty, is to have lived in a ridiculous fantasy world. Can't wait to be a hundred years old so I can teleport to the moon colony and jump around the terraformed gardens, to tour the moons of Jupiter and witness the great planetrises.

Also I guess war is happening. When is it not, though. Hope no one is bothering my diasporic Ukranian friends at this time. There is a particular agony when your point of origin is in the newsmedia; photographs you never wanted to see reproduced everywhere you look, know-nothing fuckwits telling you what you should feel or accept, the worst questions at the most inane and inopportune times, etc. I pray for a swift end to these harrowing events, and as minimal a fallout as reality will allow. Also the many other conflicts and genocides unfolding as I type.

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It would be a good day to talk about like, a U2 record, specifically, War. You know, "Sunday Bloody Sunday" and all. I don't really like U2 at all, though. A task for others.

Now, the song "No Man's Land", by Eric Bogle (I always think of the Dropkick Murphys version, personally), that's close to the mark for me. Also and more generally applicable in any case, Black Sabbath's "War Pigs (Luke's Wall)", the best song about war as far as I know anything about it, right up with "Masters of War" by Bob Dylan (my preference is for the New York City Town Hall version on The Bootleg Series vol. 7: No Direction Home, which are the discs closest to my heart in that series). Great tracks, those, evergreen in any situation. Could be wrong and out of touch, but it seems like people don't do antiwar songs like they did back in the day. Can't personally think of anyone off the top of my head besides Neil Young, who is an old-timer from back in the day. Living With War, there's an album. 

At any rate, maybe I don't talk too much about the whole deal. Maybe there's no need to pack that kind of heat on a day like today. I am sure, though I shall not look around to verify, that enough people are doing enough stuff, at least in terms of satisfactorily performative self service to personal optics and the amassment of modern clout.

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What differentiates modern clout from traditional clout? Well, some would say that a wi-fi outage or a server crash evaporating every trace of your clout means you are in fact without what the ancients would have considered clout. Clout used be more durable. Took more to earn, took more to lose.

We are how we are and the times are the times, though. As someone who wields absolutely zero clout outside of his own personal bubble, maybe I'm not even qualified to comment. Maybe I've got the wrong idea.

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The Berlin Wall came down the year I was born; nevertheless, the world was still at war, and it has been at war without cease ever since. Mostly people just get on with it. What the fuck are you gonna do, you know? What the fuck is there to do. Make art. Fuck around. Do necessary communitarian labor. These activities make it hard to go to war, which is basically a net good even if you're not great at any of them. 

As always, my disclaimer: what the fuck do I know about anything? Nothing.

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Well, I mentioned some albums. That'll have to do for today, because today is kind of depressing, and I'm gonna hang out with a friend. 

Peace, peace, peace gosh darn it

--JL