"The rumors started seeping out of Ukraine about three years ago: A young Russian film director has holed up on the outskirts of Kharkov, a town of 1.4 million in the country's east, making...something. A movie, sure, but not just that. If the gossip was to be believed, this was the most expansive, complicated, all-consuming film project ever attempted."

"Last month Jane Bennett gave a talk at New York’s New School entitled “Powers of the Hoard: Artistry and Agency in a World of Vibrant Matter”. She was interested in the question of whether or not compulsive hoarders have a particular affinity for matter, specifically, the matter of/in the things they so assiduously collect. The purpose of this post is to ask a similar question about trumpet players and their mouthpieces. Some have only a few, while others have hundreds."

"Humans have been seeing strange things on the surface of Mars for centuries. From the 1700s up through the present day, widespread fame has been available to anyone able to produce even the slightest bit of flimsy evidence that there's Martian life."

"In many ways, this intensified recurrence may be something we can learn from rather than worry about. I think it’s sociologically interesting when or if readers have the same reaction to these kinds of fringe stories as they recur and recirculate. It tells us something about where such stories exist in larger productions of knowledge and information, that we have a firmly marked off niche for “well, that’s nuts but non-offensively so”. The story makes no lasting impression on us, we don’t learn it or incorporate it, it doesn’t challenge us, but we also have a continuing expectation that these stories will continue to be with us and continue to be of interest to us. We’re not repelled by them, not transformed by them, we expect them and find them momentarily intriguing."

"…Being on fire, you would probably apply powerful pails of water to put it out, and send off your man for the engines? You would do very wrong.…"

"The Birchers have tried to rebrand themselves without changing their essential message, with a slick new Web site featuring a multicultural set of children emblazoned with American flags, announcing that they are simply “Standing for Family and Freedom.” But inside, the forums offer support for the 9/11 Truth-associated Texas gubernatorial candidate Debra Medina and tales that “the fall of the Berlin Wall and the ‘collapse of communism’ were not planned and implemented by the Soviet Union’s KGB.” DVDs for sale purport to tell the truth about alleged conservative impostor Newt Gingrich. Even Nelson Mandela is described as “nothing more than a communist, terrorist thug.”"

"On another occasion, a morning radio host in Los Angeles invited me to be interviewed on his show about some city planning issue. When I called in, he asked two or three clueless questions about housing, and then blurted out that he had Penn on another microphone. Apparently, he thought he was a junior Geraldo Rivera doing an ambush interview, which, naturally, would segue into a debate about whether I had killed six people. I got an apology from the station manager for that."

I, I, I.

"I had two crucial ingredients: Mathematica and NKS. With Mathematica, I had a symbolic language to represent anything—as well as the algorithmic power to do any kind of computation. And with NKS, I had a paradigm for understanding how all sorts of complexity could arise from simple rules."

Donna Kossy

via: Danny Yee

One of the best examples of unadulterated all-natural bullshit I've seen in many years. My faint hope is that it's some sociology experiment... but no. People are suckers.

For many years I've collected psychoceramica, and they've missed a few of the better spotting points. Will post a response ASAIC.

Donna Kossy, author of <i>Kooks</i> and <i>Kooks 2</i>, sells books by those same folks. Among others.