Inside every dog there exists a perfect

Painting by Monsu Desiderio.

Baghdad Burning returns: "We’re learning that militias aren’t particular about who they kill."

"Allegories are in the realm of thoughts what ruins are in the realm of things." --Walter Benjamin, quoted in: Michel Makarius, Ruins (2004)

Yesterday, When I Was Young.

"Yes, I thought, if I were a human skin lampshade who might or might not have been constructed by a doomed Jewish shoemaker at the behest of a mad red-haired woman on a horse, and then found sixty years later by a dope fiend in an abandoned house after the worst storm in United States history, there could be worse places to return to the earth than inside the gates of the Dispersed of Judah." --Mark Jacobson, The Lampshade (2010)

Wardwesan.

"One version of Internets is played like this:

Ironic shit becomes more and more deadpan and hard to distinguish from the real stuff. You get points by being able to tell one from the other. At the limit, there will literally be no difference whatsoever between the two types of things. Those who can still tell them apart win.

Of course, there will be no way for mere mortals to distinguish someone who can detect literally undetectable differences between the ironic and the non-ironic from someone who can't. But those who can will be able to." --Fists O'Fury

Cassilda's Song or Cassilda's Song or Cassilda's Song or Cassilda's Song.

Aztec Steampunk.

"While I was at J.P.L., I heard talk of a survey, perhaps apocryphal, which asked astronauts if they’d go to Mars on a one-way trip. Three-quarters supposedly said yes. (“The pilgrims on the Mayflower didn’t hang around Plymouth Rock waiting for a ship to take them back,” the Apollo astronaut Buzz Aldrin later told me.)"

Gayageum Pachelbel (via this thread).

"And Kaesong is one of the most talked about geomantic cities..." (Hong-key Yoon, p. 10)--a phrase which sets me to dreaming, Calvino-like, of things that might be; he also introduces the phrase "iconographic warfare" (loc cit), which has applications today.

Masked Marauders. (In those days they called it a "put-on".)

A painting by Jonathan Winters

Bruce Sterling's closing remarks at the latest SXSW: "If you want to know what the worst-case scenario is for us, what would happen if Austin conclusively lost? Waco. Waco, Texas. The defeated Austin. Waco, Texas used to be the 'Athens of the Southwest.' That was its name. Waco was an intellectual center of education, of science, art, culture, and radical publishing.

Yes, in Waco — but the fundies got Waco. They just took it down. They won conclusively. Waco went down with all hands."

And: "If I'm going to properly mourn something, I will cry about centuries of paper-based literature being disrupted and dis-intermediated. My subculture world I loved so well: xeroxed fanzines, science fiction monthly magazines, publishing houses, independent bookstores, newspapers, magazines, libraries, novels.

I wrote 'em. I really liked novels... As it happens, I recently wrote a new novel. Funniest novel I ever wrote. It's an ebook, you can go and look for it if you want. It doesn't make much difference if you do or you don't. We just don't live in a world where novels can be important in the way that novels used to be important.

Nobody reviews them. There are no paper periodicals that talk at great length about paper novels to people who spend their lives reading paper.

The bookstore chains have been disrupted. They are collapsing. I am a novelist. I myself don't go into bookstores very much now. They have become archaic, depressing places. They are stone cliff houses. They are half abandoned.

If I don't go in there, certainly my readers are not going to go in there. I know where the readers went. They’re all on the internet, or in social media, just like me."

2 lists.

Jinkx Monsoon covers the alien diva song from The Fifth Element.