Image from the current Met exhibit, The Perfect Medium, examining the intersection of the developing form of photography and the once wildly popular interest in spiritualism. I gotta get there before it closes.I possess lousy bona fides, the kind of thing which ought to stifle me when I'm around the auspicious, but I fake for parties. And yet, inside my teeny black heart, I know I'm a fraud. As mere bullet points on paper, I am as undistinguished as can be. My opinions aren't worth anything based on the formal paths I followed or the public validation, mostly lack therof, I receive. I recently met a lot of people in one room with impressive CVs and excessive accomplishments in various arenas. For a moment, I'll admit I lost the thread of my own preferences and aspirations, rudderless and mute in the wake of those others who, while not homogenous, mutually admire each others' plumage. This is not to say they're wrong. I admire them all, too, but dislike when I grow indistinct in reflection against others' brilliance.
What all this means is that of the possible backpats I might receive from the credentialed and vaunted, I value your reading this most. Those loyal friends who want to encourage me and those of you who came searching for competitive eating, fighting midgets, or a misspelled missing blond teen. Miracle of miracles, you have opted to give me another chance to amuse or inform or distract, and I'm delighted. Here some other things which delighted me.
1) Elgin Tyrell is another idiosyncratic blogger who does editorial cartoons from photos (photorials), and has worked me into his parody of Garden Party. As you'll read, I don't save my boring DDT rants just for you. Heck, no. As the lights came up in the hospitality room, and some of us foolishly relocated to another bar downstairs, we'd covered a lot of topical ground. It was especially nice to talk to another person concerned with visuals and art and examining that potential online. And he won the limbo contest!
2) Publius Pundit is Robert Mayer, an energetic guy who's passionate about international affairs and democracy. We talked most about the decline of Russia's democracy and health under the crony oligarchs of Putin. He also put me onto This is Zimbabwe, a blog from Sokwanele, the Civic Action Support Group. These two are not light and frothy places to visit, but if you can stomach the resulting sadness and rage, they have important things to say about the plight of people under that villain, Mugabe.
3) As I am drawn to the odd and speculative, and have lately been fixated on remote cardiac arrest for certain dictators I shall not name, I will drag you, too, into the book I once read on China's Super Psychics. For myself, I found the anecdotal assertions dubious and not terribly well-supported, a result of the government suppression of information, authors claim. Still, the stories of academies of psychic children starting fires and one master psychic busting through walls, as I recall, and killing by mentally squeezing a target heart from miles away were gripping stuff. For more convoluted tales of the feats of alleged super psychic children, try this Edge article or more from Spirit of Maat.
Yet, I always wonder why we haven't heard more about them if they exist in such great numbers. How such powers could be kept under absolute control, especially as kids reach adolescence? Are they born or made? Wouldn't there be at least a few unidentified cases running wild, reading numbers from strange armpits willy-nilly? I'm just saying, we know how the whole Carrie scene and X-Men went down. Even the Amish understand you have to allow adolescents rumspringa.
But picture this. We get a cool house with awesome video games and closets of branded apparel. Then we fill it up with a coed group of hormone-laden, super psychic kids, who haven't been out of the compound, if you know what I mean. Huh? Right? Is it TV gold?! Platinum, baby!
Reminds me, I have the DVD of Penn and Teller's BullShit! to watch.
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