<Baudrillard RIP> May the Evil Demon of Images no longer haunt you.

<Dom> I have a title for your anthropology story:

It's there in his forum. Why not post your idea of Episode Two? And then I'll do Episode Three? Or <Eyal> if he wants.

Main thing is that it will get on the Doggy's tits, since he doens't countenence malarky in his kennel

Jess Of the <I, Doggimus> Production team.

I still think it's a brilliant idea.
Let's run it up the flagpole and see if the money salutes.

But if you consider <reified milk floats> alongside spousal homicide, Aids, car smashes, a stabbing or two, death by ingrowing fingernails, cocaine-induced heart failure, mysterious murders by rent boys, and all the other weird exit strategies employed by the 60s/70s generation of French/Italian/German theorists and intellectuals -- Barthes, Foucault, Althusser, Pasolini, Deleuze, Fassbinder, etc -- it seems "clear" that (a) Barthes took the "lightest" or "most floatingest" option (b) there is a mysterious pattern, probably CIA-inspired, which no true paranoid conspiricist could fail to be scared straight by ("I'll be good, I'll behave, I wanna live! There *are* real things, there are! Look, there's one! I refute it thus! And truths, lotsa truths, all the truths you people want, yessir! Don't make me die weirdly, what would posteriority think? Please, please, pretty please!"), plus (c) the Camus precedent in a so-called accident, and (d) Derrida survived unscathed for a suspiciously long time.

Times change, but some patterns recur. These days, if a Euro-man slips on a banana peel, he sues the state via the state-run road-cleaning department, and is paid damages. After paying his legal bills, he should have enough for a new banana.

In America, a guy slips on a banana peel, sues the company, and is offered Guatemala as part-settlement pending the class action.

Yet nobody ever sues the lawyers who keep the whole circus going, or the comedians who write the jokes that perpetuate banana humour, or the white males whose members give rise to the phallic symbolism that inspires the humour, or Andy Warhol for the first Velvet Underground album cover, or for being dead.

Good thing Warhol wasn't an intellectual -- or worked hard at pretending not to be. Otherwise we'd have a serious <worldwide funny-death among artists and intellectuals scenario>, and the paranoids would be right.

So, like, Valerie Solanas and G. Gordon Liddy were really the same person? And he/she also 'did' Pasolini in Rome? And Timothy Leary with a slow-acting cancer virus? And was the lookout person on the Barthesian milk float, cunningly disguised as the same bilberry yoghurt used to send messages to Karpov in Baguio City in 1978?

A Roman speaks. His fine roman nose is roman all over his face.

- What, you don't believe in Jupiter? Or Vulcan? Or Venus? But that's plain daftus, amicus, look -- you can see her right there in the sky. You'll be telling me next that Christianity has a future when Nero's finished with it...

<Meanwhile, back in France, the last intellectuals huddle in a corner, fearfully smoking gauloises and trembling with <fear and trembling>>:

I think he allows anything, actually. But there are quiet periods. You shoulda seen the pun-party that Two-birds and I threw on the <Beer> page way back when -- my 1000th, I think -- covering about 20 pages with gibberish afore we got nuked.

"Way back when", eh? Phrases like that must give the longtime members the shudders, given that I'm technically a recent arrival. We're both catching up fast on everyone -- top two spots by summertime, yah?

Actually, I did invite you to my Mth. But we didn't know one another well enough to attend dodgy 'parties' in them days.

Tonight's excursions -- random, surreal, spotted dick and frogspawn -- are in honour of old Baudrillard, whom we were talking about only a coupla days back. Another man down. I may need a new set of heroes soon...

But I'm just about worded out now, I've been running/writing/etc for 22 hours, and I am. About. To. Stop.

<His Excellency President for Life Field Marshal, VC, DSO, MC, King of Scotland, Lord of All the Beasts of the Earth and Fishes of the Sea and Conqueror of the British Empire in Africa in General and Uganda in Particular>

And apparently he used to refer to the Ugandans as <the Scots of Africa>.

If I would point to someone of the French bunch who died too early (in the sense of not producing more works), btw, it would definitely be Barthes. At 65 he was still at the height of his powers, and unlike most of the others he wasn't just recycling himself - almost every book of his contained something genuinely new; you never quite knew what to expect from him.

<that strange and exciting period poised between all the garish superstitions of medieval xtianity and the emergent science of Kepler, Galileo, Descartes, Newton et al.> Kepler himself, btw, was poised between both in quite a fascinating way - besides making one of the great breakthroughs in the history of astronomy, he believed very strongly in all sorts of astrological/mystical notions, that from a contemporary scientific perspective are considered total crap. It was genuinely devastating for him to arrive at the conclusion that the planets were moving in ellipses rather than the "perfect" circles.

<Jess Of the <I, Doggimus> Production team> <Main thing is that it will get on the Doggy's xxxx, since he doens't countenence malarky in his kennel>

<Domdaniel> <I think he allows anything, actually.>

How Dutch is that Moggy in the Window?

<Jess> Like Marcus Aurelius (pop stoic version) always sez: consider each person, corporation and thing in its own individual nature. What is it? What does it want to be? Is it in the nature of <twinlark> to censor even the further shores of trans-pellucidity? To erase something potentially <immortal> by Jess-the-Mess or something <immoral> by the Dom Squad?

Never. But it's in the nature of the CG Pop Cops, for previously dissected reasons.

<Eyal> Last King of Scotland would be nice. Alas, I think they simply ran together some early obits with their media sources, thus:

<Media Guru Dies -- The Scotsman. Great French Postmodernist -- The Times.>

... to produce "Baudrillard: media guru, Scotsman, and great French postmodernist..."

- Hah. Perhaps some of *this* will bring him round...

- No! No! Not the Lemming Adrenalin Extract!

<Forum University Cryptic Kinematics. Patents, R&D and Dept of Mad Boffinism: Chess, other uses of; Cryptography.>

Fischerrandom or Chess-960 can be used as the basis of a cipher. Each of the (say) 960 start positions is designated in advance to signify a particular transformation of the alphabet (or a more complex one-time pad). Simple examples include:

#137: normal alphabetic order, (+1): [HAL] ---> [IBM]

#138: QWERTY keyboard order, (+2): [TEX] ---> [UTV]

This is where chess knowledge – and a dash of Kriegspiel – can be used to make things interesting. The encrypted signal begins with the part-score of a chess game, eg 1.c4 f5 2.Bc2 Nf7.

Which tells us that the White bishop started on either b1 or d1 (d1 is more likely, otherwise why not 2.Bb1xf5…? Or, if the Pf5 was protected by a queen or rook on f8, then 2…Nf7 would block it and lose the pawn. This could be a gambit, but we must still assume competent play. 2…Nf7 also places a black Knight initially on either h8 or d8.

After a few moves have been played, retro-analysis will make one particular setup the only logical start, giving us the code for the day. A certain amount of chess skill is needed to decode it – and while a computer could easily do this, no normal chess engine could do so. It would take a specially-written program, with some chess skill – knowledge of the rules is not sufficient (it must be able to tell when a gambit is plausible, etc).

One further refinement is the possibility of fake messages. A medium-strength chessplayer might deduce that start position #204 is likely – a guess that seems verified when its application produces a message in clear English, “We meet Fischer beneath Snaes Jokull at midnite to travel to the centre of the Earth”.

But it takes a retro-GM to see further, to know this is too easy, that it misses a piece sac on move 11, winning via Zugzwang; and thus the alternative setup, #529, is to be preferred. Which produces a message in deep-crypto Finnegans-Wake/Entropanto-style English… but which happens to be the ‘real’ message.

“In the desert of the real, sit on your hands to produce the rotting map of the true text: you will be walking into the Thar but you will not be walking out of the Thar.”

A report on a recent film starring Marianne Faithfull as a housewife who goes to work at the sleazy end of the sex trade, giving what is euphemistically termed 'manual relief'.

So it didn't win the Oscar. But one paper reported that it "came away empty handed" from the awards...

Oops.

Meanwhile: from a 'Pets for Sale' newspaper advert:

thank God you woke up!!

"Go to work on an erg" is a variant that plays with the notion of ergonomics as the study and measurement of, yes, work.

"Go to work on an erggg" is the familiar sound of one's students throwing up in the back of the lecture hall. (Which is it this time, Prof -- you been feeding them drink? Drugs? Getting them pregnant?)

Post hoc, ergonomics propter hoc

ex nihilo! Charge!

Are you guys familiar with the Academic Journal <Notes and Queries>?

It's a <pedant's> delight, I've spent many a happy hour just randomly leafing through it. It's great-- all about clearing up arcane bits of literary information.

Fidel!!

<Part One: "Young Doggimus">

Yes, here is the version that made it past the censors (bless em):

Young Doggimus learns to "go fetch" and to annex <Capricornia>, and discovers that through a tangled Royal Pedigree that he may actually be his own father...

With <Tom Cruise> as Young Doggimus (Nick Cave got fired- too old)

And <Penelope Cruz> as a wastepaper basket.