Zwol.org

"I have amassed enough evidence to convince me the universe is a fractal larva grown in a five-dimension fluid information medium. I think the larval universe is growing rapidly towards adulthood and understanding, so nothing scares me much, except for giant spiders and normal sized moths." How I love this guy!

"When the cat sticks its head into your Tim Horton's Own sandwich bag, the Tim Horton's Own sandwich bag will get stuck on the cat's head, because the bag and the head have, by a happy accident of geometry and karma, the same circumference."

Debunking WTC Urban Legends: I've visited this site many times in the past and it's good to see that they're still able to separate the wheat from the chaff.

Doc: "The best thing we can do is inform ourselves and keep asking better questions. There is nothing about either that's unpatriotic in the least."

Dave: "I watched CNN and MSNBC last night. They showed pictures of Americans lining up to buy gas masks. I don't see that happening anywhere around me."

Dave again: "I selected all my David Bowie songs and right-clicked to play them in WinAmp, thinking it would be all Ziggy Stardust and Major Tom, but to my surprise..."

Zeldman: "I can picture the overworked creative director in a news organization, choosing from different graphic treatments of AMERICA UNDER ATTACK: 'Use a different font. Too fancy, too bloody. Show me something with the Towers.'"

"In retrospect, ours was a story repeated, not only by myself later in life, but throughout the U.S. untold countless times through the two decades that Baby Boomer 'nerds' were creating what would become the Internet, leaving a carnage of broken relationships, and sometimes families, in its wake. The irony may be a bit thick, but it bears saying with some seriousness that zoo keepers will one-day transfer their knowledge of gibbon breeding to inventors and their mates. It certainly would help technology along because invention becomes less relevant when it is used as an emotional anesthetic rather than growing from a creative dream."

The Title That Wasn't There: The next Coen brothers' movie is "The Man Who Wasn't There" but the linked article won't really shed any light on that. It's worth a read, though, for such gems as this:

They had solicited my advice, they now told me, because they thought that, being British, I might know some "Shakespearean stuff that might work". They propounded the theory that a good title intrigues, is suggestive, allusive, and makes one want to know more. I was going to suggest "The Man with the Gas Hearth" but, mindful that they also wanted something that savoured of pulpy confession, proposed "My Hearth Is Gas". This prompted a few minutes' thought from Ethan at the end of which he asked: "Is that from the sonnets?"

Who's looking for "zol.com"? More importantly- Why?

We're more nuts than you: "You shoot guns into the sky to celebrate victories over enemies, and people are killed by the bullets raining down on them. We not only do this for New Year's Eve in some cities, but we burn houses down, tear up streets, loot and sack our stores, and beat ourselves senseless when our sports teams win championships. Sports teams! We made a sequel to Police Academy 5. We gave an award for singing to two guys who never even sang. We put little sweaters on dogs. We shot John Lennon six times and didn't even aim for Yoko Ono."

Doc on Post-Industrial Journalism: "It's not that I'm sour on the Official Story. Again, I'm not even sure I disagree with it. I just know we miss too many facts by replacing dialog with chant."

Steven Grant says what he thinks: "[Superosity has] more in common with strips like CATHY and DILBERT in that it deals with various social phenomena. Not quite up to the general level of either of those, though, but not bad either." And I'm left thinking Ouch! Not up to the level of CATHY? Wow, man- that's harsh.

(In case you've misplaced your sense of scale recently.)

1984 MIB: Now, I don't know that this is true, but... "Ridge wants the uniforms of this State Political Police division to be modeled on existing state trooper uniforms - except done in black. If you've ever seen New Jersey or Pennsylvania State Police uniforms, they have dark blue pants and lighter blue uniform on top. They also have those old-fashioned pants that bag out like the old German or Gestapo pants. They'll have jet-black jackboots, and black uniforms with lots of gold insignias indicating the Power of the State."

WTC Ground Zero Photos: Thumbnail page with 72 photos, each full-size photo is a rather large jpeg, but the file sizes are reasonable. Amazing stuff, though. Like this one.

Another Amazing Photo: This one an arial view of the site. An even larger version is here. (via Dave Winer's Scripting News)

And speaking of Dave Winer: "Last night's West Wing was worse than a CNN town meeting. What a load of crap. I cringed 18 times and then fell asleep. FWIW, they probably wrote the script two weeks ago. In that context it makes sense. In that sense last night's WW was good art, it was an anachronism, and provides some clue as to how fast things are moving now. Popular culture of two weeks ago is already out of date."

TV is Evil (and resistance is futile): I've now seen two whole episodes of a TV series in a row for the first time since 1999. We'll see how long I can put up with this, but as a long-time trekkie I've decided to give Enterprise a shot. Granted, the pilot was pretty lame, but I see potential.

Kevin Pease has a pretty good reason not to watch it, though, as he points out that there is probably enough Star Trek existing already and the concept is now far from novel. "What's the next series going to be?" He asks, "What's left of time and space? Maybe it will be set entirely in the Q Continuum. That would be interesting. Instead of showing us outer-space metaphors for familiar scenarios, they can show us the familiar scenarios in their original form, and tell us that they are meant to be visual metaphors for something else beyond human comprehension. Naturally, all of the characters would be named Q."

Excerpt:

We were about 5 hours out of Frankfurt flying over the North Atlantic and was in my crew rest seat taking my scheduled rest break. All of a sudden the curtains parted violently and I was told to go to the cockpit, right now, to see the captain. As soon as I got there I noticed that the crew had one of those 'All Business' looks on their faces. The captain handed me a printed message. I quickly read the message and realized the importance of it. The message was from Atlanta, addressed to our flight, and simply said, 'All airways over the Continental US are closed. Land ASAP at the nearest airport, advise your destination.'

Now, when a dispatcher tells you to land immediately without suggesting which airport, one can assume that the dispatcher has reluctantly given up control of the flight to the captain. We knew it was a serious situation and we needed to find terra firma quickly.

And the Town of Gander has related links from some of the passengers.

The Head Lemur Holds Forth on the issue of Piracy and the Internet: "Does every Entertainment Conglomerate CEO who gets a chance to talk about the Internet have no sense? In the past few days a number of entertainment company chief executives have been stepping up to the plate to tell the world how to run the Internet. These folks are primarily in the music and movie business."