'Soy Bomb' - 1998 Grammy Awards

"This much is certain: well into Dylan's performance of "Love Sick," a man with the words "Soy Bomb" painted on his bare torso appeared from behind the singer and then began a flailing, jerky dance next to Dylan. The legendary performer paid the uninvited dancer little mind as he writhed next to Dylan for what seemed to be forever until he was hustled away by security.

Beyond that, the story is as bewildering as the dance itself. On Thursday, the "New York Post" identified the man as 26-year-old Michael Portnoy, a self-described "multigenere mastermind artist" who also told the paper that he is "almost a vegetarian."

Portnoy told the "Post" that he was on stage as one of the young people recruited by the Grammys to sway and bop approvingly in the background during Dylan's performance, and that he cooked up his impromptu dance number as "an act of pure revolution."

Asked about the meaning of his cryptic "Soy Bomb" message, Portnoy told the "Post" that it refers to "sort of life and death and explosion."

According to the "New York Daily News," Portnoy said his true message was about commercialism's intrusion into the world of art, and that somehow, "All art should be soy bombs."

The "Daily News" report also counters the "Post" report that Portnoy was invited to the Grammys. The "News" reports that the man (who despite his best efforts to shock the world didn't even wind up being the evening's top story thanks to Ol' Dirty Bastard) paid $200 to attend the ceremony.

Portnoy also told the "Daily News," "Bob Dylan is the past, and I'm the future of music."

Maybe not, but Portnoy has secured a spot in music history as a curious footnote."

[ 15 January 2003: Message edited by: liquidocean ]

Millions of Americans have seen Rollen Frederick Stewart, a.k.a. "Rainbow Man," who achieved notoriety during the late 1970's by appearing in the crowd at thousands of televised sporting events wearing his trademark rainbow-colored afro wig. Later -- after he became a born-again Christian -- he added a sign reading "John 3:16." Over the years, grabbing the attention of the media became an obsession for Stewart. He abandoned his home and marriage to roam the country living out of his car, studying TV Guide each week in a never-ending quest to stay televised.

Here's what we do know: Someone has somehow been able to embed at least three tiles in the asphalt of major intersections downtown, all of which convey a cryptic message about resurrecting the dead on Jupiter, a phenomenon putting Cincinnati on some kind of psychic plane with cities around the world. And our mayor has nothing to say about it.

[ 23 March 2002: Message edited by: liquidocean ]

Negativland vs. U2, Island Records,
Casey Kasem, U.S. copyright law

And yet, it is Kasem's signature the band needs now to recover the rights and remaining, confiscated copies of U2. After years of correspondence, they finally got Island Records and U2's manager to agree to return the rights to their work, but only if Kasem promises not to sue anyone but Negativland later on. It was Island Records that effectively squashed the album.

Who knew that making fun of U2 was gonna cause so much trouble.

"Our goal is to protect the consumer," said Island's Bill Adler, explaining the restraining order that pulled U2 off the racks in September of '91. "The artwork is deceptive. It's made to look as if it were a new U2 record. We didn't want fans of the group buying this and being tricked."

Though Negativland's label at the time, former Black Flag guitarist Greg Ginn's SST Records, did release the CD and 12-inch single just before U2's Achtung Baby arrived in stores, and while the jacket art did make it look like a U2 record, the track itself could in no way be mistaken for U2; hell, it mangled U2. Moreover, their "trick" was meant to rattle the very kind of humdrum consumer who might mistake, on first pass, a parody from the "real" thing, to make them aware of how they are sold rock brands (as opposed to bands), and by people who, as the man said, don't give a shit.

That Island fancied itself an advocate for comatose shoppers was only the first of many ironies in the case, and the brouhaha that surrounded it is now legendary. Ginn, doing business as SST (under the banner, "Corporate Rock Still Sucks"), caved in to Island almost immediately and the disagreeable settlement blew up later, when Negativland, having left SST, made the entire affair highly public with a 97-page magazine (later expanded into the 270-page Fair Use: The Story of the Letter U and Numeral 2). Pissed off over the magazine (and other things), Ginn sued Negativland and Negativland counter-sued, taking advantage, finally, of pro bono (if not exactly pro Bono) attorneys. Ginn and Negativland eventually reached a settlement. The tragedy of U2/Negativland, Hosler told California Lawyer magazine last year, "was that in 1991 we didn't understand that we had an ideal case to defend."

Hosler's conviction stems from Negativland's exhaustive study of the Copyright Act, drafted originally to prevent plagiarism, not censor satire. (The prospects for Fair Use have improved thanks to the unanimous 1994 Supreme Court decision that defended 2 Live Crew's appropriation of Roy Orbison's "Oh, Pretty Woman.")

"It's inevitable Pepsi will find out, but we hope Pepsi has a sense of humor," Negativland member Don Joyce says. "Our intention is not to get sued."

"We have never been in favor of bootlegs," clarifies Joyce. "Bootlegging is thievery and it's the opposite of what we do. With a bootleg you try to make it sound indistinguishable from the original. We try to transform it, to make something new out of something pre-existing."

To be sure, not all of the U2 drama was bleak. Negativland did its best to turn the whole thing into a Warholian performance piece and Kasem and U2 were often up to it. Kasem sent the group a copy of Norman Vincent Peale's The Power of Positive Thinking. Mondo 2000's R.U. Sirius invited Hosler and Joyce to surprise U2's guitarist, The Edge, during a phone interview for the magazine. Toward the end of the conversation, Hosler asked The Edge for a $20,000 loan to pay the damages sought by Island. The Edge laughed and said he'd think about it.

Throughout the ordeal, in fact, the members of U2 were for the most part good-natured about the prank, although the band never did make a B-side out of it, as U2 manager Paul McGuinness once suggested, nor did The Edge wire any cash. A comment on U2's friendly nonresponse can be found in Fair Use: a photo of Bono singing, captioned with a U2 lyric, "I must be an acrobat ... to talk like this, and act like that."

Yet another good thing to come out of the fracas was Sonic Outlaws, an inspirational documentary film about media pranksters by Craig Baldwin.

NEGATIVLAND, WITH OR WITHOUT U2

Still, while most of the press on the U2 single was sympathetic, it tended to overlook the rest of Negativland's career, thereby ignoring the sum of (as of now) 18 years of experimental sound, sound fashioned from layered sampling long before it reached mass audiences with hip- hop and Beck. Also missed by most reports was Negativland's earlier, national media hoax (chronicled on their CD Helter Stupid); their unassailable DIY ethic (the band self-produces and has hand-made the jacket art for each of the 15,000 copies of their first record); and, perhaps most significantly, their relentless critique of advertising, a critique that has become so shrewd, the ad agency Wieden & Kennedy (of Nike fame), has approached Negativland about doing some work for them on the Miller Genuine Draft campaign. "We thought about it for 15 seconds," says Hosler, but then said no.

[ 15 January 2003: Message edited by: liquidocean ]

Basquiat - Samo

Jean-Michel Basquiat was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1960. His father, Gerard, was an accountant. And like many American boys, Jean-Michel drew cartoons and avidly read MAD Magazine. These details seem quite plain. So what made Basquiat’s life so unusual and his artwork so highly esteemed? For starters, Basquiat was a black artist within an almost exclusively white art world. However, blackness did not make Basquiat famous; his work commanded attention on its own. In fact, even his graffiti stood out from the countless scrawls on the streets of Manhattan, evident when The Village Voice offered a $100 reward for information to help identify the man behind the tag, "SAMO." Exactly what made Basquiat one of the most revered artists of the twentieth century is hard to pinpoint. While some argue that he was a true genius, others would retort that Basquiat merely got lucky as a product of the times. But it is hard to believe that he owed everything to luck.

Although Basquiat did not receive classical training in art, in many ways his life indicates that he was a natural artist. Basquiat’s mother, Matilde, introduced him to art at an early age. She took him to New York’s museums and theaters, and he learned to draw from the books she bought him, such as Gray’s Anatomy. Basquiat had trouble tolerating those who were less intelligent than he was (most notably his teachers), and he never graduated from high school. For a while, he attended "City-As-School" (CAS), a program designed to use the city’s vast array of cultural assets (museums, planetariums, etc.) to teach smart kids who had struggled at traditional schools.

As a student in the CAS program, Basquiat gave birth to an idea that led to his first taste of fame. One night in 1978, after smoking pot with friend Al Diaz in the CAS student lounge, Jean-Michel came up with the idea of "SAMO." Standing for "same old shit," SAMO represented a conceptual religion that you could buy in packets, like a drug. Basquiat, Diaz, and other friends made up all sorts of details for SAMO (such as a weekly ceremony in which a Samoid priest placed yarn on a person’s closed eyes, thus literally "pulling the wool over your eyes"), and they began creating SAMO propaganda. They drew cartoons and wrote essays about SAMO for the CAS student paper, though the most important aspect of SAMO was the propagandistic graffiti.

Basquiat and Diaz took ink markers and spray paint to cover the streets with their SAMO graffiti. They wrote somewhat cryptic and poetic sentence fragments all over lower Manhattan’s art districts, signing each tag, "SAMO©." The graffiti caught people’s attention. On December 11, 1978, The Village Voice printed an article on SAMO and offered the $100 reward described above. However, SAMO merely represented a starting point in Basquiat’s artistic career. When Basquiat and Diaz had a falling out, Basquiat marked the end of their collaboration by writing, "SAMO© IS DEAD."

After the initial attention surrounding SAMO, Basquiat publicly exhibited his work for the first time in 1980 at the "The Times Square Show." There, Jean-Michel created a large installation piece and signed it "SAMO." Of the many artists featured in the show, Basquiat was one of the few individuals mentioned in the Art in America review, which noted: "A patch of wall by SAMO, the omnipresent graffiti sloganeer, was a knock-out combination of de Kooning and subway spray-paint scribbles."

[ 15 January 2003: Message edited by: liquidocean ]

All your base are belong to us

All Your Base. A line of tortured English from an 80s videogame - 'All Your Base Are Belong To Us' - became a cult. The growth started when someone made the phrase into an MP3'd song.

The virality stemmed from the idea of inserting the phrase into topical scenes - ads, billboards, press releases - and this bottom-up creativity led to thousands of websites and doctored photos. This meme's slow to fade; rock videos for the song reared up as late as October 2001.

[ 27 September 2002: Message edited by: liquidocean ]

"Kilroy Was Here"

This meme originated during the second world war, when wharf inspector James. J. Kilroy of Quincey, Massachusetts used the slogan "Kilroy was here" to mark products he had tested and approved. The marked products appeared on many battlefields, and the signature that seemed to appear just about everywhere caught the imagination of many soldiers, who began to copy it on just about any writable surface (Funk 1950). Most likely others were intrigued by the slogan that appeared in unlikely places, so they copied it further to spread the myth.

While the meme spread well for several decades, it eventually went all but extinct in its active form. There seems to be several reasons for this:

Competition from other forms of graffiti, with stronger ties to subcultures.

The ageing of the most highly infected population. Since the tendency to scrawl graffiti is highly age-dependent, it seems to be likely that as the original cohort aged, they did not reproduce the meme as often as before, and the original context was gradually lost.

A lack of novelty. Practically all people have been exposed to the meme, but part of its appeal was the surprise effect of a well placed "Kilroy was here" scrawl; once it has been seen and understood enough, the novelty wears off. A bit paradoxally, the meta-meme of knowing about the Kilroy meme inhibits the further spread of the Kilroy meme, which makes it in fact a contra-meme to the Kilroy meme. This is why today, such a large body of people have knowledge about the meme, i.e. the meta-memetical level, without actually being infected by the original meme (otherwise it would still appear on the city walls).

Properties of the Meme
"Kilroy was here" is extremely well suited for the transmission phase, where it is encoded in a graffiti vector. It is very easy to reproduce, and due to its brevity the copying fidelity can be very high. Its decodability is also high, since after the second world war English became a lingua franca over a large part of the world and acquired a certain status. The meme was spread by English-speaking hosts, and would thus tend to end up in areas where English was understood at least by a part of the population.

The survival of graffiti is highly variable, but by its nature it is semi-permanent and intended to be highly visible, which ensures that more potential hosts notices it.

It is uncertain how well "Kilroy was here" can be abstracted. In its original form, the graffiti vector was an integral part of the meme and crucial to hint at that it should be reproduced. Later variants appeared, such as a cartoon figure and stickers, but they do not appear to have been as fertile, mostly because they were harder to copy.

The meme's intimate connection to its vector, e.g. walls, made it poorly fit to survive in other media. Also, the meme was very sensitive for mutations. It was enough that you changed one of its smallest parts, a letter, to seriously damage the meme.

It is of great help to understand this phrase, that is to know what the English words mean together. The problem of decoding the sentence is quite an easy one, but it is harder to decode what it really means. This is probably one of its strengths. One can find ones own explanation of its meaning. Further more it is small and simple. During a time when the meme is popular, the host also gets multiple chances to try to decode it.

Since the meme is without obvious meaning it is hard to contradict, so there should be no active defence against the meme. The meaninglessness of it can also invoke wandering thoughts about the meme, and actively elaborating is connected with better remembering.

What motivated people to spread the "Kilroy was here" meme? There was never any direct host-to-host contact in the case of this meme. This meant that no host received a direct positive feedback, which is a powerful reproduction booster. And there was no obvious hook accompanying the meme.

This is one of the great meme mysteries. Perhaps that was enough motivation to spread the meme, to become part of the mystery - and also, in the beginning, to share the joke of who this much-talked-about Kilroy character was. Thus, the host created a bond with a community of Kilroy writers, most of which she would never meet, but could still belong to. A feeling of belonging may have served as a hook to motivate the conscious spread of the meme.

The Kilroy writers only way of confirming that there were others was the indirect feedback, but this is also the point. The Kilroy writers became invisible, even before each other, so that the meme seemed to live its own life mysteriously reproducing on the walls and the writers themselves could feel as privileged members of a mysterious brotherhood.

[ 15 January 2003: Message edited by: liquidocean ]

Bert / Bin Laden

Right now, the two appear to be inseparable -- at least on ubiquitous posters carried by pro-Taliban demonstrators.

Devotees of freak-humor websites will recall the infamous "Bert is Evil" page, a shrine to the gourd-like Sesame Street character, which offers compelling photographic evidence of the muppet consorting with Hitler, the KKK and, of course, Jerry Springer.

Now, in a move that defies all rules of logic, a doctored photo showing Bert with the world's most-wanted terrorist, Osama bin Laden, seems to have made its way into an anti-American Islamic protest in Bangladesh.

Reuters photographs of a rally this week organized by Jaamiat-e-Talabaye Arabia, a radical Islamic organization, show that protesters created a pro-bin Laden sign out of a collage of photos they apparently lifted from Internet sites.

But -- is it fate or coincidence? -- the sign featured a Bert muppet sitting on the left side of the man believed to be responsible for the bloodiest terrorist attack in U.S. history.

An editor at Reuters' photo desk in Washington confirmed that the maize-colored muppet did appear in the photograph. "It is in the original image, though I couldn't say how it got there. It wasn't hacked," the editor said.

One of the first sightings of the Osama-Bert poster was in a news photo on a Netherlands portal site. Enterprising Net-researchers soon reported it appeared in Sweden's leading tabloid, and also on Yahoo's news photos section.

The "Bert is Evil" webmaster replied by writing this on his website: "Yesterday a lot of you alerted me to a picture of a Taliban propaganda poster with Bert! Reality is imitating the Web! I am honestly freaked out! Holy shit!"

In an e-mail message to Wired News, webmaster Dino Ignacio said: "My theory is that the Taliban have Internet too. And I think Bert is universal enough to appeal to them, too."

A closer scrutiny of one of the photos reveals a second apparent faux pas on the part of the radical Islamic protesters: Another clip art photo of bin Laden used in the photograph seems to show him with a bottle of Jack Daniels.

It didn't take long for word to spread. A discussion on lindqvist.com is titled: "The mystery of the Bert-bin Laden connection evolves with more images coming in every day. Is this a big hoax? Has somebody got too much time? Or is somebody in Bangladesh trying to confuse the world?"

Bert is best known for his role on the long-lived Sesame Street children's show, where he lives with his housemate Ernie.

[ 15 January 2003: Message edited by: liquidocean ]

The Tourist of Death

The identity of the world-famous "Tourist Guy" has been revealed, but his fear of becoming an Internet freak show means he'll be shunning the limelight. The Tourist Guy, or "Tourist of Death," is a 25-year-old Hungarian man called Peter. He asked that his last name be kept confidential, because he doesn't want to become the next Mahir Cagri, the lovesick Turk.

"I'd like to keep my identity incognito," he said in an e-mail. "This was a joke meant for my friends, not such a wide audience."
The break in Peter's silence ends two months of rampant speculation over the identity of the man in a black cap and eyeglasses who has become the latest Web craze.

Shortly after Sept. 11, Peter pasted a plane into a photo of himself taken on the observation deck of the World Trade Center on Nov. 28, 1997. Amused, he e-mailed it to a few friends for a laugh.

The doctored photograph spread worldwide on the Net. Then his face started cropping up all over the place. Web surfers quickly turned Peter into the Forrest Gump of the Internet, placing him at the scene of major, minor and just plain inane events in history.

Websites dedicated to the meme, like Tourist Guy, Tourist of Death and WTC Tourist, began collecting the pictures and have been adding to their galleries daily.

Though well aware of his growing fame, Peter laid low for weeks. He feared the mockery visited on previous Web celebs. He didn't want to become an international laughing stock like Mahir Cagri, or Clair Swire, the British woman whose lascivious e-mail spread around the world like a virus.

"I was afraid that some people might have misunderstood my intentions," Peter wrote.

But when Jose Roberto Penteado, a Brazilian businessman, claimed to be the Tourist Guy, Peter's friends outed him to the Hungarian online news site, Index.

Penteado scored a lot of media coverage at home and abroad, as well as an offer to appear in a television commercial for Volkswagen. But now it's clear he is not the guy.

Despite a close resemblance to the Tourist Guy, Penteado was always at a loss to explain how his face was put atop the doomed tower. He looked like the guy but the photographs weren't his. He said he wasn't sure, but friends must have digitally added his face to the photograph, as well as the plane.

After seeing Peter's pictures, Penteado conceded that his short-lived fame had come to an end.

"Now I believe that the real person showed up," he wrote in an e-mail. "I think I have a brother in Hungary and I didn't know."

It turns out Volkswagen had already withdrawn its offer to put Penteado on TV. The company decided that being associated with the destruction of the WTC wasn't the image it was looking for, Penteado said.

The Brazilian actually welcomed his return to anonymity. "Thank you all, and now I think I will have some peace and quiet. I hope," he wrote.

Unlike his Brazilian rival, Peter has the original, unaltered photograph of himself on the observation deck, or so he claims. He scanned and e-mailed what appears to be an undoctored copy of the original WTC picture to Wired News.

Prompted for more proof, Peter made a trip to his parent's house to dig up additional photos of himself taken atop the WTC, included above.

Wired News has not seen the original prints, but taken together, the three pictures strongly indicate Peter as the source of the original image.

Peter told Index the WTC pictures were taken during a trip to New York to visit relatives. At the time, he was working at a hotel in Colorado Springs, Colorado.

Despite his reluctance to embrace fame, the spotlight beckons. Asked if he would consider a TV advert like the one Penteado was offered, Peter was enticed. "Commercial?" he wrote. "Maybe. Can that be done anonymously?"

His unexpected notoriety has already brought some dividends. Old friends who recognized him from the picture called him out of the blue.

"The good aspect of it was that some people I haven't seen for a while looked me up," he wrote.

[ 27 September 2002: Message edited by: liquidocean ]

Mahir Cagri / I Kiss You!

"Mahir Cagri, from Izmir, Turkey, was projected to instant fame when news about his homepage spread among internet users . Entitled Welcome to my homepage!!!!! I kiss you!!!! the page contains pictures of Mahir and describes his lifestyle in broken English: "I like to take foto-camera (amimals , towns , nice nude models andpeoples)....." Mahir's homepage has received over a million hits. It has been featured in Salon magazine, and is covered in this week's edition of The Onion under the headline "Turkish man Kiss You." Sadly the homepage wasn't real. Mahir claims that his home page had been pirated and that his worlwide fame, or infamy is undeserved. "

[ 27 September 2002: Message edited by: liquidocean ]

__________ "ate my balls",

where __________ is: Chewbacca, Mr. T, Batman, He-Man, Seven of Nine, Kramer, The Original Yoda, Richard Simmons, etc, etc ad nausium.

This meme never became mainstream as far as I can tell, but I ran into it on the web many years ago, probably in 1996 or 1997, and found today that it is still going strong.

Try a google search for "ate my balls".

vect0rx

[ 28 March 2002: Message edited by: vect0rx ]

Dada, Dadaism, Marcel Duchamp [French, from dada, child's word for a horse]

Nihilistic movement in the arts that flourished chiefly in France, Switzerland, and Germany from about 1916 to about 1920 [and later -ed.] and that was based on the principles of deliberate irrationality, anarchy, and cynicism and the rejection of laws of beauty and social organization.

The most widely accepted account of the movement's naming concerns a meeting held in 1916 at Hugo Ball's Cabaret (Café) Voltaire in Zürich, during which a paper knife inserted into a French-German dictionary pointed to the word dada; this word was seized upon by the group as appropriate for their anti-aesthetic creations and protest activities, which were engendered by disgust for bourgeois values and despair over World War I.
In the United States the movement was centered in New York at Alfred Stieglitz's gallery, "291," and at the studio of the Walter Arensbergs. Dada-like activities, arising independently but paralleling those in Zürich, were engaged in by such chiefly visual artists as Man Ray and Francis Picabia. Both through their art and through such publications as The Blind Man, Rongwrong, and New York Dada, the artists attempted to demolish current aesthetic standards. Traveling between the United States and Europe, Picabia became a link between the Dada groups in New York City, Zürich, and Paris; his Dada periodical, 291, was published in Barcelona, New York City, Zürich, and Paris from 1917 through 1924.

In 1917 the Dada movement was transmitted to Berlin, where it took on a more political character. The Berlin artists, too, issued Dada publications: Club Dada, Der Dada, Jedermann sein eigner Fussball ("Everyman His Own Football"), and Dada Almanach.

In Paris Dada took on a literary emphasis under one of its founders, the poet Tristan Tzara. Most notable among Dada pamphlets and reviews was Littérature (published 1919-24), which contained writings by André Breton, Louis Aragon, Philippe Soupault, and Paul Éluard. After 1922, however, Dada faded and many Dadaists grew interested in surrealism.

[ 15 January 2003: Message edited by: liquidocean ]

In the spring of 1964, Ken Kesey invested nearly all his writing royalties and created a company known as Intrepid Trips, Inc., which funded the adventures of the Merry Pranksters -- essentially a group of hippies determined to live and explore life to the fullest, in the Here and Now. To the establishment, the Pranksters were the epitome of the stereotype of the era, the Drug-Crazed Freak.

Kesey's first novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, (about an insane asylum that revealed the madness of society itself) and his then just-completed second novel, Sometimes A Great Notion (about the logging business) had both received critical acclaim, and both eventually wound up on the silver screen. Kesey, at age 28, was being heralded as one the great writers of the day.

With Intrepid Trips established, Kesey bought an old bus, a 1939 International Harvester school bus to be exact, fully equipped with bunks, a refrigerator, cabinets and sink, the perfect road vehicle. With Babbs and numerous other Pranksters -- including Neal Cassady (Speed Limit,) Kesey's brother Chuck, Carolyn Adams (Mountain Girl,) Page Browning, George Walker, Sandy Lehmann-Haupt, and Mike Hagen (Mal Function)-- Kesey painted every last inch of the old school bus in blasting psychedelic day-glo patterns, swirling colors, images and mandalas. The Pranksters rigged it with a sound system so they could broadcast outside as well as inside of the bus, and cut a hole in the roof so anyone who felt like it could sit up there and play music or trip on the bird's eye view of the ride.

Finally, they fashioned a destination sign and placed it on the front of the bus: 'Furthur' it read.

They balanced it with one on the back that read: 'Weird Load'

When the bus was finally Prankster approved, they mixed up a huge batch of orange juice. Not just any orange juice. But orange juice spiked with LSD. Since LSD would not be outlawed until 1966, this was the one drug on board that was perfectly legal.

On a warm summer day, the Weird Load took off bound for New York. There, they would take in the World's Fair and celebrate the publication of Kesey's second book.

The plan was to film the journey along the way. It was supposed to be the first acid movie, a veritable breakthrough in artistic expression. It was, in fact, the original magical mystery tour. Beyond the acid, the Pranksters were equipped with costumes --overalls, T-shirts, jeans, most all accented in screeching green and halting orange day-glo. Babbs, especially, was seriously into day-glo, and used it to paint virtually everything, including his face.

The Prankstersí now-famous journey, chronicled in Tom Wolfe's American classic, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test included endless encounters with straight America. For instance, Kesey was invited to speak at a Unitarian Church Conference for youth, influencing quite a number before the talk was done. The Pranksters partied with the Hell's Angels; tripped through the Beatles performance at the Cow Palace; and virtually blew away Timothy Leary and his cast of LSD voyagers with their wild and crazy approach to life. As strange as Leary may have been to the average American bear, Kesey and the Pranksters were viewed by the Leary crew as downright -- weird.

The lone Chinese protester who brought a column of tanks to a standstill in Tiananmen Square during the 1989 crackdown was never arrested and is still at large, a Hong Kong-based dissident group has said.

Seven hundren people were killed in the Tiananmen Square crackdown Chinese students who supported the pro-democracy movement captured the attention of the world's media with their seven-week occupation of Tiananmen Square in June [1989].

However, the most memorable images are of a young man, carrying what appears to be a shopping bag, who refused to move out of the way of the advancing tanks.

He then climbed onto the leading tank and spoke to the driver.

The Information Centre for Human Rights and Democracy Movement in China says it has obtained official documents that show the Chinese government does not know what happened to him.

Although the man was initially identified as Wang Weilin, the documents suggest the name was false.

In response to an inquiry, President Jiang Zemin is said to have blamed journalists for giving authorities the wrong name. The Chinese government gave up looking for the man after checking lists of the dead and imprisoned.

Time magazine has cited the unidentified protester as one of the "top 20 leaders and revolutionaries" of the 20th century.

Dubbing him "the Unknown Rebel," the American news journal said his moment of fame was seen by more people than laid eyes on Winston Churchill, Albert Einstein and James Joyce combined.

Chinese authorities sent tanks into Tiananmen Square in the early hours of June 4, 1989 to break up an extended demonstration by Chinese student activists. Several hundred people were reported to have been killed.

China has never admitted publicly that there were any deaths as a result of the crackdown.

Source: BBC

[ 19 May 2002: Message edited by: Catch-22 ]

'Fish Wars' - (click on picture for link)

For some time now, we've all seen cars with little metal fish screwed into the rear end where the model and dealership's name sometimes are. Most people know that the fish is a symbol of Jesus Christ, whose name is often spelled out in Greek inside the fish. It's a way of spreading the evangelistic Christian meme complex.

Evangelism is an essential component of a virus of the mind. If a religion does not evangelize -- contain as part of its teaching that it is important to "save," "convert," or "pass the favor on" -- then it is at a severe disadvantage when competing with other belief systems for a share of people's minds. The fish on the back of the car is but a small means of taking the message into the age of advertising. Televangelists have done a much more effective job at the same thing, consistently increasing their "market share" at a time when most religions see their membership ("memebership"?) dwindling.

More recently, there's been a new fish in the sea of cars: a little fish with legs growing out of its bottom. Inscribed inside the fish, in place of the Greek "Jesus," is the word "Darwin."

I laughed the first time I saw this, but then started to think. Have scientific-minded folk finally figured out what is one of the main points in my book "Virus of the Mind": that it's evangelize or be evangelized, meme or be memed? Did this Darwinian fish disseminate from the Simonyi Chair at Oxford held by Richard Dawkins, his mission to popularize science by peppering it with good memes? If not, it's the kind of thing that should be done.

Most people's experience of science is a boring high-school class with impenetrable textbooks and difficult exams. If scientific ideas could be as fun as astrology, and be as good ice-breakers at parties, we'd be on our way. I myself have begun to ask "what's your blood type?" instead of "what's your sign?" and launch into an informal research project along the lines of Dr. Peter D'Adano's ideas about diet and blood type.

Meanwhile, though, the fish wars continue. Last seen was an escalation on the Christian side: A big Jesus fish, mouth gaping, about to swallow the little Darwin fish. Heh heh. But it's sad that religion vs. science has to be seen as a competition. The purpose of religion is to guide us in living meaningful, fulfilling lives. Science should compliment that, not compete with it. Much of the fuss is about conflicts between scientific theories of the past and religious creation myths. These are not the most important things to be thinking about anyway. What kind of future do we want to create? How will we accomplish it? When I meet in San Francisco next month with many other concerned individuals from around the globe at the State of the World Forum, we will address these issues. They are big, almost imponderable issues, but thinking about them is a step in the right direction.

[ 27 September 2002: Message edited by: liquidocean ]

The Secret Writer's Society, a Macintosh game published by Panasonic Interactive Media, is designed to help 7- to 9-year-olds learn to write by reciting their compositions back to them.

But the simple game goes awry when a child types three or four sentences in a row and double clicks the mouse. At that point, the program will recite words such as "masturbation," "fellatio," "asshole," and other words that make many parents squeamish.

The anonymous programmer, who added the features to the game while under contract to Panasonic, developed the crack with the help of RTMark, a venture capital-style funding organization for activists.

"I wanted to wake parents up to reality -- here's what happens if you hand your responsibility to some machine," the programmer said in the RTMark statement, which will be released on Monday.

RTMark paid the coder US$1,000 for his trouble.

When the problem first emerged in June, Panasonic blamed a software glitch and offered replacement copies to any concerned parents. On Friday, the company again denied that the swearing software was the product of sabotage.

"We wrote that software in-house, so I believe that the programmer's claims are untrue," said Panasonic's Elizabeth Olson.

Olson said that the problem resulted from a feature written by Makoto Morise, head of the company's education and DVD division.

"We were aware that kids could use the software to read back bad language so Makoto wrote some code prohibiting the software from reciting about 40 swear words," said Olson.

But the editor of a Web magazine that evaluates educational software finds the rogue-programmer explanation plausible. Andrew Maisel, the editor in chief of SuperKids, said he found it strange that the problem only hits Macintosh computers.

"I don't believe that Panasonic developed the text-to-speech software in-house, and so I would suspect that [the] so-called bug could indeed [be] the action of a rogue programmer."

Panasonic claims that kids will have a hard time getting Secret Writer's Society to utter obscenities. But Maisel disputed that claim, saying that colorful language was only a few clicks away for a curious child.

Last year, RTMark offered similar assistance to a programmer at Maxis, the software publisher behind SimCopter. In that incident, a staff programmer added unscripted characters to the game that only appeared in certain scenes.

SAN DIEGO (AP)
When 7-year-old Zachariah Zelin ripped off the Christmas wrapping, he
squealed with delight. Santa brought the talking G.I. Joe doll he wanted.
Problem was, Joe talked like Barbie.

His doll stands at the ready in its Army fatigues, machine gun and hand
grenades at its side. But it says things like, "Want to go shopping?"

The BLO has claimed responsibility. That's Barbie Liberation Organization.

Made up of more than 50 concerned parents, feminists and other activists,
the BLO claims to have surreptitiously switched the voice boxes on 300 G.I. Joe
and Barbie dolls across the United States this holiday season.

"We have operatives all over the country," said one BLO member, who wished
to remain anonymous. "Our goal is to reveal and correct the problem of gender-
based stereotyping in children's toys."

Among the messages the tampered G.I. Joe utters are, "I love school. Don't
you?" and "Let's sing with the band tonight."

In a deep voice, the altered Barbie says, among other things, "Dead men tell no
lies."

The BLO claims a few other doll voices were reversed in Canada, France and
England. The group contends Barbie teaches sexism and passivity in girls, and
G.I. Joe influences boys to act violently.

A spokesman for Hasbro Inc., the maker of G.I. Joe, called the BLO's attack
"ridiculous."

"This will move us to have a good laugh and go on making more G.I. Joes," said
Wayne Charness of the Pawtucket, R.I.-based toymaker. "Barbie dolls and G.I.
Joes are part of American culture."

A spokeswoman for Barbie's creator, Mattel Inc. of El Segundo, would say only
that no consumers have complained.

When Zachariah was asked whether he wanted Santa to take back the feminine Joe,
he responded sharply, "No way."

"I love him. I like everything about him," he said as he and three neighborhood
friends played with the doll. "He's teaching me not to fight."

His parents are thrilled, too. Although Zachariah has water guns, his parents
say they oppose violent toys and were unwilling to buy the G.I. Joe.

The doll was Zachariah's grandparents' idea. The parents were shocked, but
tickled, when the doll turned out the way it did.

Zachariah's parents said they are not part of the BLO, and had never heard of it.

"I think it really became an educational toy. I'm really happy it worked out
this way," said Zachariah's mother, Susan Orlofsky. "Our job is to help him
understand so that he doesn't think he has to be a soldier. I think it's amazing."

http://users.lmi.net/~eve/download/barbiedir.pdf

[ 27 September 2002: Message edited by: vocab ]

In 1986, Dan Rather was chased, pummeled and kicked on a Manhattan sidewalk by a well-dressed man who kept asking "Kenneth, what is the frequency?"

That quixotic statement, and Rather's account of the surrounding circumstances, baffled the world. Some doubted the CBS anchor's story altogether. The line took on a life of its own, spawning a hit song, a slang term and the punchline to Letterman jokes for the rest of the decade.

Now, it seems the "Kenneth" mystery has been solved--and we all owe Dan an apology. His assailant turned out to be William Tager, 49, who's serving a 25-year prison sentence for killing an NBC stagehand outside the Today show studio. Tager told a psychiatrist that he thought the news media was beaming signals into his head. One of his obsessions apparently was to find out the frequency of the signals.

Yesterday, after examining photos given to him by the New York Daily News, Rather finally fingered Tager. "Everybody's had their guess about what happened, and some have had fun with it. Now the facts are out. My biggest regret is he wasn't caught before he killed somebody," Rather told the newspaper.

While it remains unclear why the attacker addressed Rather by the wrong moniker, the legacy of the Kenneth query remains firmly entrenched in pop culture. "Kenneth" has entered Gen-X-speak, meaning a confused or just plain clueless person.

And, most famously, R.E.M. borrowed the line for "What's the Frequency, Kenneth?" on 1994's Monster album. The track turned out to be prophetic, with lyrics like: "'What's the frequency, Kenneth?' is your Benzedrine/I was brain-dead, locked out, numb, not up to speed."

In a moment of self-parody, Rather donned shades and joined the band at Madison Square Garden for a tuneless (on Rather's part) rendition of the song, which aired on the Late Show with David Letterman.

[ 27 September 2002: Message edited by: liquidocean ]

Guardian Angels began twenty years ago, on February 13, 1979. In the years prior to the Guardian Angels launch, Curtis Sliwa had become famous for his neighborhood clean-up and beautification projects in the South Bronx. Using his co-workers at the Fordham Road McDonalds, where he was the night manager, Curtis formed the "Rock Brigade." The Rock Brigade received accolades and a full wall of awards from community and governmental groups around the city. Planting and cleaning up vacant lots, boarding up bombed-out buildings, they managed to make this notorious inner-city neighborhood more beautiful. But it wasn't any safer, nothwithstanding how well-swept the sidewalks were.

The elderly sought refuge in the MdDonalds, knowing that Curtis would walk them home safely, along with his coworkers. When one retired transit worker pleaded with Curtis to do something about the muggers and street thugs, Curtis decided to expand his neighbohood cleanup and pride program - to patrol the subway, then known as the "Muggers Express."

He recriuted a multi-racial team of volunteers, largely gleaned from his employees at the McDonalds. It started out with Curtis and twelve volunteers. They were known intially as the "Magnificent Thirteen." They agreed to ride the subways between the toughest stops, without weapons, to find the gang members who had been mugging the straphangers in the subway and detain them for the police to arrest.

It was a dark time in New York, with massive budget deficits, law enforcement layoffs and increasing crime. There was no funding for much needed law enforcement either from within or from without New York. Neighborhood watch groups were desperately needed, but they were not universally welcomed.

Notwithstanding some initial resistance, the thirteen soon grew to thousands, and was renamed the Guardian Angels, to counter the then-popular Hell's Angels group: Angels for good as a contrast to the Hell's Angels, who had glamorized violence and terror. With men and women from around the world forming the Guardian Angels chapters world-wide, they made a difference in the lives of people in the communities they patrolled, every single day.