Journal of No. 118

 Surreal dream that I made an effort to remember, and then forgot, and have just now remembered:

I was in a mash-up of Bertie&Jeeves and Harry Potter.

Sounds potentially interesting, but the writing was shit, and there was no special effects budget.

I picked up a cheap copy of Mark Twain's Innocents Abroad, detailing his travels in Europe and the Holy Land. I was struck by his reaction to a statue at the cathedral in Milan.

The figure was that of a man [St. Bartholomew] without a skin; with every vein, artery, muscle, every fibre and tendon and tissue of the human frame, represented in detail. It looked natural, because somehow it looked as if it were in pain. A skinned man would be likely to look that way, unless his attention were occupied with some other matter. It was a hideous thing, and yet there was a fascination about it some where. I am sorry I saw it, because I shall always see it, now. I shall dream of it, sometimes. I shall dream that it is resting its corded arms on the bed's head and looking down on me with its dead eyes; I shall dream that it is stretched between the sheets with me and touching me with its exposed muscles and its stringy cold legs."

Here he is -- Bart that is, not Twain -- if you're curious. And some other views.

Some Tea Party types were flying around (like on mechanical wings) a post-apocalyptic-ish world, constructing office buildings complete with phone lines and internet connectivity for the benefit of the unwashed masses (OWS types?), who had devolved into Morlocks. The Morlocks couldn't do anything other than go all 2001 on a phone handset, as though it were a nice bone-weapon. The Tea Partyers shrugged, as if to say-- see, we gave them everything they needed to form successful multinational corporations, and they did nothing with their equal opportunity. (Subconscious subtext: Education is also important.)

Crazy, I know. I mean... Tea Partyers doing something for the benefit of someone else.

The latest from Tepid Nightmare Theater:

I dreamt I went to work.... unshaven. Dun dun DAAAAH! [lightning/thunder SFX]

---

So. About that atheist billboard at the Lincoln Tunnel.

I give it thumbs down. I was comfortable with the good without god ones, and the you're not alone ones. They seem narrowly tailored to appeal directly to non-believers. And if believers take offense at that, that's just too bad.
Although AA is trying to spin "You KNOW it's a Myth" as though it too is appealing only to those who do indeed know it's a myth, I think the phrase is clearly confrontational to people who don't know that. It's on par with You KNOW you're going to Hell. And while clearly there are provoking billboards of that nature, I don't think it's helpful to stoop to that level.
The CFI bus ad skates pretty close to the edge, too, I think. More importantly, I'm not sure how effective it is likely to be. I'd rather it just had the slogan, and a bigger CFI logo and link for people who want to know more. The slogan's a good one, and I think it would be valuable to just have it out there, like 'Be kind to animals' or 'Have you hugged your kids today?' or 'Gnothi Seauton'. I'm not a huge philosophy fan-boy, but surely those would be an improvement over ads for the Double Down.

Had a strange dream a couple nights back. It was vaguely Asian-themed. It begins (or my memory of it begins) in media res, with me riding on a sort of a futuristic jet-ski, with several of my fellows on nearby jetskis. At first it's strangely videogame-esque, as ninjas(?) would pop out of the water in front of me, and I would dispatch them with a swift slash of my katana. After a few rounds of slice-a-ninja, the team was reassembled in the cellar of the alchemist. We were searching for some alechemical doo-hicky and found an elaborate sliding and locking mechanism in the floor. Long metal pieces would slide along tracks in the floor, and when they were in the right arrangement, the floor within their compass would depress a few inches, at which point, they had to be slid into a new arrangement. And... that's it.

I finished reading Bad Astronomy. It was fine, but written for a general audience, so I didn't derive very much that was truly new from it [but not nothing -- although the Hubble can't exactly image the Earth, it can be (and occasionally is) pointed at the Earth, so that one camera captures 'streak flat' images to help calibrate it.]. I have a problem with some of his analogies and writing, but most of this beefing is just me wanting to push him out of the way so I could write it more goodly.

On the 4th of July, as I mentioned before, the Creamer kids came by to plant some pumpkins in the garden. It seemed to be a big hit, particularly with Tristan, who watered the entire garden, I think. They are neat kids, and possibly prime examples of the superintelligent futuristic species that will replace us.

In the evening of the 4th, we had a few friends over to eat, drink, ignite explody stuff, patriotically play Rock Band, and envy the people with the illegal fireworks that lit up the sky.

The lovely yet not-very-posty dark_of_night and I are at a Superbowl party. It's the pre-game yet, so I'm busy with a drink in my hand. Not sure what it is, but I apparently want more of it, as I can vividly see myself pouring more of it out from a pitcher, making sure that I get a few of the ice cubes in the pitcher into the glass (which entails a long, sloppy pour). There are other guests there, including notjenschiz and hagdirt, who has (natch) brought hors d'oeuvres. Or is it colleency with the food? Or is it both? Or some dream-addled fusion of the two?
Some group of revellers heads out to bring back pizza or something similar. After they've been gone for a time, the game starts. Mercifully, I am spared any oneiric opening ceremonies and we go right to the action. There's either no kick-off, or I missed it.

First play from scrimmage:

The Colts have the ball, Peyton falls back deep into the pocket, looking left. He's got great protection, plenty of time to pick and choose. He winds up the laser rocket arm and ZZZZiiingg -- WAIT!!! Mr. and Mrs. America and all the ships at sea: THERE ARE JEDI ON THE FIELD! At least, two fans dressed as Jedi have evaded security and entered the field of play. Marvin Harrison and his defender, both playing the ball, have collided at full speed with the Jedi, knocking them to the turf. OH, THE HUMANITY! Pandemonium reigns. A cameraman storms the field, so we get closeups of the battered Jedi, completely unconscious near mid-field. A small, child-like figure dressed as Yoda with a huge immobile latex full-head mask dances in concern at the feet of the prone robe-clad figures.

Back at the party, the away team has returned, and we pull them to the TV for the instant replays. YOU'VE GOT TO SEE THIS! In slow motion, the cameras have captured the impact and the clouds of dust and grass-shreds that rise as the Jedi slide about ten yards across the turf after the collision - the flop of their boneless limbs clearly indicating that they are OUT. Prime comments that YouTube's servers are going to burn out tomorrow morning once the nerds hear about what happened. I agree, "This will bury the wardrobe malfunction."

As the dream begins to fade-out, someone inside a homemade droid costume is being interviewed somewhere in the stadium. The expressionless head has two flaps on it that waggle chaotically, unskillfully controlled by the person inside. The droid also emits unintelligible machine-noises in response to the questions of the reporter-on-the-field.

Crap... most of it has faded away, but I had one really fucked up dream. I wish I could remember more of the details...

Anyway, I'm on a bed, or really just a bunch of pillows lying on the ground. The setting is sort of a natural cave. For some reason, I know that I'm going to be assaulted by 20 midget assassins. Spears come poking up from between the pillows, and I snap them off. But the worst comes when they assault me hand to hand. I whisk them off their feet and bash their skulls in against some rocks. I can recall smashing the first one's head against a rock over and over again. It takes a surprising amount of work to bash in someone's brains until they stop moving.
Fortunately, midgets don't seem to go in much for group tactics, so I kill them all, one by one.

For my efforts, I win something, or something like that, and a box appears and when I put the midget bodies in it, the midgets are resurrected. So I guess all's well that ends well.

NO MIDGETS WERE HARMED IN THE MAKING OF THIS DREAM!

I was lying on my back in bed, in that sort of half-aware state. I was dreaming... it wasn't quite a lucid dream, but close.

In the dream, I was also lying on my back in bed. And the ceiling was a big computer monitor. The whole ceiling. It was like some sort of super-GUI web-interface. Then my body floated off the bed and right into the ceiling.

I was fully immersed in a 3D web environment. It was like flying through a huge opera theatre, and the main stage was the browser window, and if you followed a link the curtains would close and open again with a new scene representing the new 'page'. God-help-me, the only page I remember was of a guy showing off his LEGO models of Star Wars ships. And it wasn't even Kevin.

There wasn't really anything to suggest that this was web-browsing, but I just knew it was. The whole thing was short and surreal. When I woke out of it, all I could think was that I would get annoyed by the time wasted in watching curtains close and open every time I went to a new page.

I don't often remember my dreams this well. Not that this is particularly good or anything. Just weird.

Rebecca and I are in a large house that is apparently ours. It seems like we've just moved in, because there's not much furniture and the walls are bare. It's night, and it's dark because there are no lamps, just moonlight and the ambient air-glow of LA filtering through the windows. I notice something creeping along the floor, and it's not Changeling. It's a giant purple spider about a foot and a half long, creeping into another room. Changeling follows after it, her hair bristling. I go in after them. The room's empty. I'm creeped out....
Suddenly, I'm sitting in the front row of a lecture hall. It's something like anthropology, and the professor is way at the back showing slides in the darkened hall. Currently, the slide is a physical map of the Mediterranean, and there's an argument going on between him and another student about whether the Old World and the Americas communicated ideas to each other. I pipe up and start giving a mini-lecture on the history of coinage, starting in Turkey and spreading through Europe, making the case that the Old and New Worlds were not connected because
#1) The people of the New World never picked up the idea of coins, so they had probably never been exposed to that concept.
#2) You don't find hoards of, for example, Roman coins in the New World, showing that they hadn't come over and traded with the New World.
The lecture ends, and I'm walking south down Westwood Blvd. near Ackerman. Lots of students are around. Soon, I'm walking through the residential area SE of campus, like where the Adler's house is. As I walk down the street, I see Juli sitting on a porch, reading a book. I can see her mother in a window. I give Juli an awkward hug as she continues to sit, and then the three of us talk aimlessly for a while. Then they go inside, but I notice a stack of coins on the porch. From a distance, they look like Susan B. Anthony's to me. I pick them up and walk away.
As I examine them, I find that they are not coins. Rather, they are like little silvery Art Deco framed pictures. The pictures are little black and silver movie posters of 1930's films I've never heard of with names of actors and actresses I've never heard of...
Now I'm walking on the upper level of a mall. There are a couple dozen weird pianos scattered around in the walkway; they're ornate, or oddly shaped, or make weird tones, or have strange striking mechanisms. I pass through them though and move on to the display of barbecue grills. Since you can obviously test out pianos, I decide to test out a grill. I pull some meat out and start grilling it. It's done quite soon, and then I walk along the mall, chewing through the large hunk of cooked cow that I hold in my hand. On the opposite walkway, I see my old (now-departed) cat, KC, walking along parallel to me. I chase him down, but then I find something hard in a bite of meat. I fish it out with my fingers and find about a five inch length of stiff wire, bent into a U. You can see the places where my teeth has slightly indented the metal.
Then I'm back 'home' and Rebecca is apologizing for giving me a big hunk of raw meat with metal wire in it for lunch. I see her prepare my lunch for tomorrow, and again it's a big hunk of raw meat. Whether it too had wire, I don't know, because I don't remember any more.