I need to see this ASAP

Still haven't pursued that thread of reading more Strugatsky Brothers after discovering that Roadside Picnic is every bit as great as the hype. 

From left to right: Macario Matus, Roberto Bolaño (Arturo Belano), Mario Santiago Papasquiaro (Ulises Lima), Orlando Guillén (the Lame), Alcira soust Scaffo (aid descouture), Julián Gómez and Bruno Montand (Felipe Müller) House of the lake, Chapultepec, City of Mexico, 1975.

I've read about Fanny for many years, (and yeah, it's probably that David Bowie interview was possibly the first mention) but I never stumbled onto their music. This 1971 live footage is amazing.

The Marvin Gaye cover at 19:40 has some wonderful slide guitar and piano work. TBH, everything about it is amazing.

Playing with Fire: 30 years on

How Did It Feel? Spacemen 3's Playing With Fire Revisited. Too often i listen to Spacemen 3 on very poor quality mp3s. That needs fixing.

The Saudis definitely want to get their hands on nuclear technology

Flynn-backed plan to transfer nuclear tech to Saudis may have broken laws, say whistleblowers. No shit. The Saudis will probably get their hands on nuclear technology anyway through Pakistan. That's probably why the U.S. is falling over itself to make that sale before that deal goes down, because the plan didn't die with Michael Flynn being charged.

Heh. I never got around listening to the entirety of Sparkle Hard.

I like it well enough. It sounds less obviously middle-aged than Sparkle Hard. Nothing bores me more right now than middle-aged music by middle-aged people right now. Give me old or young. There is an extremely maudlin streak in art made by middle-aged people.

What caught my eye was this Holy Mountain looking thing suggested by Youtube after i watched that. I'll need to remember Aldous Harding.

Found out that Damo Suzuki is playing New Orleans on April 28th at the Music Box Village. Think i'll be out of town. Looked to see what he's been doing live in recent years and found this lecture, which I'll watch later.

Russian Doll

Years ago I gave up any pretension of possessing an ability to critique anything coherently, but the new television series Russian Doll is pretty fucking Borgesian. It's seemingly very conscious too. An interview I've seen with one of the creators says she loves video games as a creative medium. It's well-known that video game creators lean heavy on Borges in their branching narratives. However, it's almost certain that Headland and/or Lyonne is directly acknowledging Borges with the mirrors and split timelines. There are too many other literary allusions. They didn't just stumble onto that, but are deft enough not to make a clumsy namecheck.

Speaking of namechecks though, it delights me that "Jodorowsky's Dune" is used as a password to a drug den.

Ken Nordine was still alive?!

Beltway Gushing for a Backstabbing Democrat

The Most Important New Woman in Congress Is Not Who You Think. Holy shit- this hagiography by Michael Kruse is extraordinarily silly and out of touch this week. Mikie Sherrill is a conservative, not a moderate. She's awful on every issue. It doesn't matter if she flipped her district from red to blue. She'll vote for shitty legislation. She'll be groomed for big stuff. She's an enemy.

More after the break.

To be honest, i only recall consciously seeing Bruno Ganz in Wings of Desire and Faraway, So Close!

LIGO is being upgraded

LIGO is being upgraded. LIGO goes back online this spring, but the next upgrade, Advanced LIGO Plus, doesn't appear to be complete until 2024.

China Is Building a Solar Power Station in Space

China Is Building a Solar Power Station in Space. Oh, cool. However:

Needless to say, the biggest problem for a floating power plant is figuring out how to get the energy back down to Earth.

The scientists behind the project are still sorting that part out. But right now, the plan is to have solar arrays in space capture light from the sun and then beam electricity down to a facility on Earth in the form of a microwave or a laser, according to The Sydney Morning Herald.

Just build a space elevator, you assholes. That would be far safer.

The idea of this solar station beaming energy to space-faring vessels is intriguing though.

Spain PM Sánchez sets snap election for April

Spain PM Sánchez sets snap election for April. Oh dear. It looks like the right wing could take power in Spain.

While the end of Pedro Sánchez's tenure looked inevitable, following his parliamentary budget defeat, this adds further uncertainty to a fragmented Spanish political landscape.

His PSOE is leading many polls and could win this election, but might find it hard to form a majority and govern.

The leftist Podemos, the PSOE's natural ally, is riven by infighting and struggling in polls.

With the Catalonia issue likely to dominate the upcoming campaign, the hardline pro-unity stance of parties on the right - the PP and Ciudadanos - could see them benefit. If the numbers add up, they could try to form a majority, possibly with the support of far-right Vox, which has enjoyed a surge in polls, due mainly to its uncompromising policy on Catalan independence.

Those damned Catalan nationalists.

I truly hate giving any credence to Russia conspiracy talk, but this story about alleged Russian agent Sergey Vyacheslavovich Fedotov flying into Barcelona twice in the run-up to the Catalonia referendum is mildly interesting. However, the time-table that the article gives for this man's movements relating to various events is a little sketchy.

India & Pakistan tensions heat up. MBS pops in to say hi

The news of the suicide bombing of a military convoy in Kashmir, leaving 41 dead, slipped right past me. (Work's been hectic. i'm working sick with a sinus infection & short-handed, because others are calling in sick.) I've no idea what Modi plans to do with this, but that article says it'll help him in upcoming elections.

Jaish-e-Mohammed is the group that allegedly responsible for the bombing.

Meanwhile, Saudi Crown Prince MBS to visit Pakistan for investment deals. These two stories aren't directly related, but they will be. Pakistan provides troops to Saudi Arabia for its invasion of Yemen.

'Oumuamua could be the debris cloud of a disintegrated interstellar comet

'Oumuamua could be the debris cloud of a disintegrated interstellar comet. However, 'Oumuamua wasn't observed to outgas as it approached the sun. I don't know nothing.

Fire all of the Portland police & abolish the FBI

Not only were the Portland police coordinating with right-wing extremists to target antifascist organizers & help their own members who have outstanding warrants evade arrest, but so was the FBI.



Never change, FBI. Never change. Its primary mission is to suppress leftist organizing. Anything else is secondary to that.

Valeria Luiselli Discusses Migrant Children and Other Lost Souls

Valeria Luiselli Discusses Migrant Children and Other Lost Souls. I liked The Story of My Teeth and Sidewalks immensely, but never got around to picking up Tell Me How It Ends. Lost Children Archive seems extremely timely.

Just flip those poles already

Earth's Magnetic Pole Is Wandering, Lurching Toward Siberia. Back in the '90s, i had numerous posts of wild speculation of what would happen if the magnetic poles flipped. Life would be exposed to massive cosmic radiation. Now there's more apocalyptic news every day. This feels quaint. The magnetic flip could be thousands of years away, but with everything accelerating, who knows?

Anyway:

The chief cause of the movement comes from the Earth's liquid-iron outer core, which is also called the "core field." Smaller factors also affect the movement. Those influences include magnetic minerals in the crust and upper mantle (especially for local magnetic fields) and electric currents created by seawater moving through an "ambient magnetic field," according to the 2015 report of the WMM.

Flowing of seawater affects this, eh? How about all of that newly released water in the oceans from melting ice caps and glaciers? Would that be a factor? Just wild speculation.

so-called Benalla Affair has a Russian oligarch connection

France's 'Benalla Affair' - the scandal Macron can't shake. Noting this because I have a coworker who has an inexplicably interest with how bad Macron fucked up & how the yellow vest protests are proceeding. What's funny is that last weekend, it turned out he'd never heard of the Benella video.

It's also interesting to me because of the Russian oligarch angle- not in the exhausting Putin! sense, but in the worldwide corruption that is capitalism. Seeing Iskander Makhmudov paying Macron's allies in what seems a a mining deal is fun in contrast with all of Macron's austerity policies. Throw in a petty thug in their service beating protesters to get his jollies fleshes out that picture better.

maritime diffusion of megalithic culture

Stonehenge mystery solved? Prehistoric French may have inspired it and other European megaliths. These researchers propose that the Brittany region of northwest France is the origin point 7,000 years ago for megalithic culture (meh) and that it spread through maritime diffusion, which seems plausible.

Over an exhausting 10 years, Schulz Paulson created a "megalith evolution" using radiocarbon dating of more than 2,000 historic sites across Europe. "We have thus been able to demonstrate that the earliest megaliths originated in northwest France and spread along the sea routes of the Mediterranean and Atlantic coasts in three successive principal phases," she wrote in the study.

Huh. How would the stone circles of Western Sahara fit into this? 

I need to look up the dates of the three phases.

35k year old human skull in Mongolia

Ancient Mongolian skull is the earliest modern human yet found in the region. 34 to 35 thousand years old. DNA analyses are being conducted on it. So far they just did the mtDNA haplogroup thing (N) but it's going to be more interesting when they determine any archaic human introgression.

Neanderthal footprints found in Gibraltar

Neanderthal footprints found in Gibraltar. 29,000 years old. Second set ever found. The Vârtop Cave footprint of a Neandertal in Romania is 62,000 years old.

(Damn. I forgot the Vârtop Cave one, and that was at my peak post in 2005.) 

Erik Prince & Frontier Services Group profile

Blackwater Mercenary Prince Has a New $1 Trillion Chinese Boss. One of those things that's unfashionable to mention on Twitter is how China fits into the Trump puzzle. Russiagate never worked for me because it's too simple. There was no one power responsible for what happened. Erik Prince is how China ties into it.

Check out this timeline. Erik Prince met Trump's people in January 2017.

Date

Event

Oct 2013

Prince meets CITIC Chairman Chang Zhenming

Jan 2014

Prince named FSG Chairman

Apr 2016

FSG first mentions intent to pursue Belt and Road projects in filings

Apr 2016

CEO Gregg Smith, former Marine, and William Fallon, former US admiral, resign

Dec 2016

FSG formally updates strategy to "better capitalize" on Belt and Road

Jan 2017

FSG announces Belt and Road partnership with China state-owned Taiping

Mar 2018

China state-owned CITIC ups stake in FSG; Taiping becomes shareholder

Dec 2018

CITIC Chairman Chang becomes FSG Chairman

Jan 2019

FSG releases, then deletes, statement on Xinjiang training camp

Neanderthals and Denisovans Lived (and Mated) in This Siberian Cave

Neanderthals and Denisovans Lived (and Mated) in This Siberian Cave. Overview of a few recent studies, creating a timeline of the habitation of the Denisova Cave. Artifacts dating 50,000 to 35,000 years ago hint at habitation by modern humans. There's no evidence yet of cohabitation.

The Pentagon compiled research into invisibility cloaking, wormholes, and warp drive

The Pentagon compiled research into invisibility cloaking, wormholes, and warp drive. Cool. It seems that related research continues under different agencies now. List of papers spawned by the  research funded by AATIP after the break.

Dolmen, stone circles, & tumuli in Western Sahara

Hundreds of Mysterious Stone Structures Discovered in Western Sahara. eager to see where this research goes. It seems some of this originally appeared in "The Archaeology of Western Sahara: A Synthesis of Fieldwork, 2002 to 2009" (Oxbow Books, 2018)

Ancient Native American canal discovered in Gulf Shores, Alabama

Ancient Native American canal discovered in Gulf Shores. Not for irrigation. It's likely a highway for ferrying goods, but what the hell do I know? 

 The canal, dug in 600 A.D., once ran south from Oyster Bay to the northern shore of Little Lagoon in Gulf Shores. It would have served as a sort of prehistoric super highway, facilitating travel by dugout canoe from Mobile Bay to the Gulf of Mexico.

blogging is the laziest way I can think of gathering fragments

Firing up one of the backup blogs out of spite seems healthy. A blog i still read on the rare occasion I'm not glued to Twitter mentioned that the Vulture wrote a piece on the ending of the Millions, a book blog that never covered much I cared about. It wasn't indie.

I finally read this week's Warren Ellis newsletter too. He riffs on something someone else coined with Elder Blogging. It sounds bullshit to me. It's only a framing of what happened before by how those who once immersed themselves in that medium now see it. It's blogging.

My first website was in 1994 & it was half-assed reviews of albums I loved & hated and promoting local bands. It went from the university site to Geocities years later. It took years beyond that to admit what I was doing was blogging & do it properly, with internal links & such. The database of that site is still on some flashdrives haunting me.

I've been toying with doing zines again, but when I reached out to contribute something to one of the Street Fight zines, following through with even a secondary contact was too much to muster. One of my friends at work does zines down in New Orleans these days, with positive response. There are even release parties. Writing another Fugue would be fun,but would it be fun to worrying if anyone would read it? Probably not. Sending missives into the void is more my style. Blogging.

Twitter is okay for gathering news, but my once-eclectic timeline is muddied with extremely political material. That's not a bad thing, but my focus on the world has narrowed immensely & my memory of recent events is regularly lost to the new big story. Making connections without the help of others is tricky. I ache more physically & i've broken my brain with Twitter's ephemeral perpetual outrage & mockery, but blogging always gave more satisfaction.

Here we go. It probably won't last very long.