Jihad For Dummies

Newcastle: Compost made from thousands of floral tributes to the late Sir Bobby Robson has gone on sale.

The £10 bags are being sold at Earsdon Plant Centre in North Tyneside, with all profits going to cancer charity the Bobby Robson Foundation.

Bouquets were left at a makeshift shrine at Newcastle United's St James' Park after Sir Bobby died on 31 July.

Florist Julie Clay, who came up with the compost idea, said half of the 80 bags had already been sold by midday.

She said: "The flowers were laid with huge respect and affection for Sir Bobby and we didn't want to see them go to waste.

"We got together a group of volunteers to separate the flowers from their wrappings and JBT Waste Services from Bedlington and Com Vert, a composting company at Felton, kindly collected, composted and delivered the resulting compost to Earsdon for us for no charge."

Bobby Robson tribute compost
Half of the 80 available bags sold by midday on Saturday

St James' Park was opened to the public for 11 days when the former England, Ipswich and Newcastle manager died of cancer at the age of 76.

County Durham-born Sir Bobby said he set up his charity to pay back the NHS for the care he had received since being diagnosed.

The Sir Bobby Robson Foundation has raised over £2m to fight cancer and recently announced Alan Shearer as its first patron.

It launched in March 2008 and focuses on the clinical trials of cancer drugs and treatments and has already equipped a cancer trials research centre and funded a specialist research nurse and doctor.

I am undeniably grumpy today.

It is Friday the 13th.

So I am taking it easy.

I have always had a general distaste and hatred for professional Rock Bands. Bands that have been worshipped since the 70s have always seemed like big, flaming turd-smelling, coke-bloated, KKKracker-ass, redneck, overhyped, moustachioe'd, cowbelling, sideburn'd losers. Bands like The Eagles, Steely Dan, Thin Lizzie, Aerosmith, Journey, Santana, Pink Floyd, Hall & Oates and others of their ilk. Suckers of Satan's cock.

Now this isn't entirely born out of a distaste for their music -- although that is most of it. I think my initial moment of disgust came when I was in my teenage years and I went to buy a CD at a record store (they still had those back then) in Brampton. This was before the complete mall-ification of Brampton when the prospect of an independent and locally owned business was still a viable concept.

I went into a relatively decent music store in downtown Brampton and bought the first GWAR Album, Hell-O:



The guy behind the counter was a replica of Johnny Fever from WKRP in Cinncinnati. I could still smell the incense that had been burned into his faded jean jacket. He looked at the album, sneered from behind his aviator glasses (well before they were "cool") and said: "You like this shit? You know this band sucks".

What could I say? This was information from Rock Valhallah, a man who probably had a 35 piece drum kit in his basement and whose alarm clock played Stairway to Heaven each morning.

But I didn't give a shit.

"Fuck that, they're great." I responded. Teenage language and debating skills were minimal at best.

"Just wait till you're 30. You're gonna laught at the fact that you once liked these bozos".

I can certifiably say that I am now 30 and do laugh at the fact that I liked and still like GWAR. I laugh because they are hilarious, they play D&D Metal and are equally inspired by Metallica, Vaudville, Robocop and Antonin Artaud's Theatre of Cruelty.

That guy in the record store has been my emblem of 1970s Professional Musician Rock which I have hated for most of my life. I have always preferred amater musicians who play as though their anuses are on fire to Professional Overproduced Rock N Roll TM. I will take The Butthole Surfers over any of those 70s bands.

I have since begun to admit that there is some amazing music that has been put out by the official YE OLDE ROCKE GODDES. Ryan Porter has introduced me to the amazingness that is RUSH and despite Neil Peart's overblown drums, they are actually so overblown that they become amazing in a non-ironic sort of way. Neil Young is undeniably amazing.

But I still have an innate repulsion for both the music and the defenders of the Rock Goddery. As soon as someone soils themselves over the amazingness of Van Halen or verbally ejaculates over The Guess Who I am reaching for my Bad Brains, Minor Threat or Anal Cunt. I will take hard, loud musicians screaming who can't play screaming about fucking over well orchestrated cowbellion rock-hellions any day.

Also, that douchebag said the same thing when I bought a Propagandhi record at his store and his record store has since closed. Hah.

Thursday evening I typically take the 630 train back to Kingston. Last week, however, we had a guest come to give a talk in our department and I was asked to come to dinner with the guest and generally entertain him with anecdotes concerning all things Canadiana and contemporary. I obliged as it meant that I would get a free dinner at a relatively swanky place in Kingston and that I would get to chat with the guest a little bit.

Turns out the dinner was worthwhile not for the food (root vegetable lasagna - seriously?) but because the guest told me about how he and his friend somehow were hired to directed Kurtis Blow's "Basketball" music video. Pretty sick.

Anyway, the dinner was fine and everything but when I finished dinner I realized that it was after 9 oclock and that I had missed the last train home by 20 minutes. Shit.

For a little while I fumed to myself feeling like a jackass and thought that I would have to take a bus home to Toronto. Definitely far less pleasurable than a nice train ride and it probably wouldn't get into the city until 3am.

Then I thought: "What if the train is late? Trains are always late. What if this train is late?"

I called the VIA Rail train information line and was told, sure enough, that my train was running late and was expected to be in Kingston station in about 5 minutes.

I bolted across Princess St and jumped into the first taxi I could find. I explained the situation in 9 words:

"Train station, late, train leaving in 5 minutes. GO!"

The taxi driver was amazing. She bolted through Kingston like I've never seen anyone do and we went from downtown Kingston to the train station in less than 5 minutes. We Torontonians criticize Kingston drivers for their slowness, but I can say with confidence that if there's a reason to rush, Kingstonians know how to get somewhere fast! We went down backroads that I've never seen before. She flashed her high beams at red lights in a pattern that made them automatically change. She raced around corners screaming about how the cops wouldn't be able to catch her to even give her a ticket. She was amazing.

We roared into the station and asked one of the taxi drivers hanging around if the last train to Toronto had left yet. He said no.

I thanked her for her amazing driving and came into the station which was full of tired and pissed off people who obviously thought they should've been in Cobourg by now. I walked up to the ticket desk and asked if the last train to Toronto had left yet.

The girl looked at me, smiled, and said: "You're on train 69 and you just got here? You're the only happy person here - its half an hour late!"

I laughed, smiled and took a seat to wait for the train. 10 minutes later it pulled into the station. I ended up sitting in a first-class car with two seats to myself and had myself a beer.

We didn't get back to the city until about 1am but I didn't mind at all as I had made it home. Success!

Walking through campus in Professor garb you are witness to the most interesting conversations.

2pm yesterday, two students walking behind me with the sort of choked-throat, salivitic vocals that suggest they just woke up. The first one is barely audible as he has that 20-something white guy bass voice that only breaks into articulate language to swear, pick up a girl or shout about a hockey game. The second one is completely articulate:

"Man I was so drunk last night. I drank a bottle and a half of wine in 40 minutes."

I glance back not to see his face but just to see his wrinkled khaki's slightly riding up his leg revealing a white Champions sock. With that information I've composed this guy as a nerd in highschool who is attempting to translate his Upper Canada College education into some perfect blend of cool + privileged here in university. Armed with Old School, Animal House and half a million in financial backing, he has come to university to chug bottles of wine, make contacts, fuck and generally prepare himself for Bay St.

There are some brief moments of conversation behind me. Nerdy Khaki guy then shouts at someone crossing University Ave up ahead:

"Shopsy!! Lookin good crossin the road buddy!"

Shopsy, who was in fact looking good as he crossed the road, looked at nerdy khaki guy behind me, waved briefly and continued crossing.

I imagined what he did to earn the name Shopsy: Were his parents working class Deli owners and the hilarity of these people actually working for a living at something that doesn't involve trading fictional financial entities for other fictional financial entities was so funny to Shopsy's housemates that he earned the title? Maybe he just eats so much red meat that he earned the nickname Shopsy. Maybe I misheard and his name is actually Chopsy cuz all he eats are pork chops. Perhaps that is actually his last name.

Regardless, I was reminded of this world of 20 year old boys (men? really?) that live in the shitty houses surrounding universities playing video games, drinking beer, waching porn, inventing nicknames for one another, occasionally doing work and generally playing at being adults. Its a very strange world of reinvention, competition, fighting and trouble where shouting at someone in the middle of the street to compliment them on their capacity to cross the street is a completely reasonable and approved behaviour.

In those environments where masculinities are developing and boys are learning to live with one another, it really is all about what you say. The rest can completely be faked.

A North Carolina man who suffered from terrible lung ailments is recovering nicely now that doctors have removed a 1" piece of plastic cutlery from his lung; the man believes it is part of a utensil from Wendy's that got into his drink: "I like to take big gulps of drink."

---

That should be the quote on the tombstone of Western culture: "I like to take big gulps of drink" with an image of mushroom clouds and a submerged Chicago and enflamed Detroit in the background. It could be line on the t-shirt that explains precisely why 20 Billion people died from an airborne toxic event.

From Titus Andronicus:

What art thou fall'n? What subtle hole is this,
Whose mouth is cover'd with rude-growing briers,
Upon whose leaves are drops of new-shed blood
As fresh as morning dew distill'd on flowers?
A very fatal place it seems to me.
Speak, brother, hast thou hurt thee with the fall?

Wednesday night Susan and I went out for a walk. Through the sadly named Liberty Village. Under the Dufferin St. bridge. Up Shaw to Queen. The night was cool, dark and promising. We sat on a bench just at the edge of Trinity Bellwoods watching the night come down, the city speed by and the CN tower keep time.

Tower, Tower, Tower, Streetcar, Tower, Tower, Tower, Streetcar

Beneath this kept time of the tower's pulses, the streetcar's wheels, bikes, strollers and dogs, there was this barely audible thumping. You could only really feel it in the vibration of the park bench. The real estate agent's glossy smile had just the slightest tremor.

"What is that?"
"What?"
"Listen"

We got up from the bench and walked into the park. We noticed there were lots more people walking into the center of the park. The banging was getting louder.

As we approached the center of the park we could see lights reflecting off trees and definitely hear audible drumming. We got to the center of the park and found a completely organic, acoustic rave happening in the middle of the park. Wednesday night, 11pm, there were multiple intersecting drum circles rocking in and out of time with one another. There were 500 kids in the pit at the center of the park completely oblivious to the world around them. Fire dancers, guys on motorcycles, juggling and the unforgiving pounding of drums. And the dancing...

Kids were obviously stoned. This was the kind of community of dancing and stranger-hugging that requires the stable foundation that only MDMA can provide. Also, kids were working in a buddy system. Everyone travelled in twos. Sociology aside, we were easily 10 years older than anyone there. We watched, smiled, wondered and walked away.

It was incredible to witness this secret society of kid dancing in the middle of the city on a normal night. From the Queen West hipster coffee shop 500m away you had no idea that this was here. The old men on Dundas didn't look up from beer. Kids like a strange collage pulled from catalogues, album covers, movies and vintage shops dancing, smiling and ushering in the death of summer deep in the grid of the city.

Reading with a coffee in an empty, silent house is a pleasurable activity

I heard an interview with author and filmmaker Miranda July where she talked about how in the middle of intense editing and shooting for a film she will buy a keyboard and imagine starting a band and running away from her movie life.

I completely understand this.

When I'm in a particularly dire moment of thesis-life I look at the people around me and think how amazing it would be to have their job.

There are three scalpers sitting at a table near me. All three are in their 40s, overweight, balding and at least one has mentioned the benefits of living with Mom.

Still. Selling tickets on Front Street wouldn't be so bad. You meet people, help people see the shows they wanna see and get to yell in the street.

Actually fuck that. These guys do not look like they have a wicked life. They all need some serious haircuts, probably could use a few new pairs of track pants and could do with a few less donuts in their day-to-day.

I know being able to play World of Warcraft 14 hours a day and only spend 5 hours of the day actually working sounds sweet on paper but when you're hitting your bicentenary and your biggest life accomplishment is a 14 hour D&D marathon in 1996 where you and three buddies LARP'd out so hard you soiled yourself - life isn't that good.

A notorious New Jersey hate blogger charged in June with threatening to kill judges and lawmakers was secretly an FBI “agent provocateur” paid to disseminate right-wing rhetoric, his attorney said Wednesday.

Hal Turner, the blogger and radio personality, remains jailed pending charges over his recent online rants, which prosecutors claim amounted to an invitation for someone to kill Connecticut lawmakers and Chicago federal appeals court judges.

But behind the scenes the reformed white supremacist was holding clandestine meetings with FBI agents who taught him how to spew hate “without crossing the line,” according to his lawyer, Michael Orozco.

“Almost everything was at the behest of the Federal Bureau of Investigation,” Orozco said in a 45-minute telephone interview from New Jersey. “Their job was to pick up information on the responses of what he was saying and see where that led them. It was an interesting dynamic on what he was being asked to do.”

“He’s a devoted American,” added the lawyer, who claims Turner was paid “tens of thousands of dollars” for his service.

Bill Carter, an FBI spokesman, said in a telephone interview the bureau’s policy is “to neither confirm nor deny whether an individual has an association with the FBI.”

Turner’s alleged 5-year-long bureau stint ended sometime in 2007, Orozco said, the year the mischievous online group, Anonymous, briefly shuttered his site — turnerradionetwork.blogspot.com — with a denial of service attack. At the time, hackers also posted what appeared to be private e-mails between Turner and the FBI.

The e-mails are legitimate, said Orozco. The FBI approached Turner, now 47, in 2002, and he spewed rhetoric about politics, white supremacy, immigration, abortion and other hot-button issues for years in exchange for government cash.

Turner was arrested in June at his apartment in suburban New Jersey.

According to court documents, (.pdf) after a three-judge panel of the Chicago-based 7th U.S. Circuit of Appeals upheld a Chicago handgun ban, he blogged that the judges should be “killed.”

“Let me be the first to say this plainly: These judges deserve to be killed. Their blood will replenish the tree of liberty. A small price to pay to assure freedom for millions,” he wrote.

A day later he posted addresses, photos, maps and other identifying information about Chief Judge Frank Easterbrook and Judges Richard Posner and William Bauer, the authorities said. State charges are also pending in Hartford, Connecticut, where Turner is accused of inciting readers to “take up arms” against state lawmakers.

Though the alleged threats came after his FBI service ended, Orozco said Turner’s relationship with the FBI is relevant to his defense.

“It is not trivial that the very government that trained an individual where the line was is prosecuting him when he has not stepped over the line,” Orozco said.

In addition, he is banking (.pdf) on the First Amendment to save his client’s skin.

“It’s a protected political statement. He opined,” Orozco said. “He said they deserved to be killed. He did not say grab a gun and go out and do what is necessary.”

My allergies returned with a vengeance yesterday afternoon. Of course it was stupidly hot and humid and I was sitting outside effectively sandwiched between two major roads downtown. So I wasn't breathing the best air in the world. But they came back so bad that I had to head home early for the sanctity of air conditioning. All the way home I was sneezing my ass off, cursing the sun and ragweed and swearing at the world.

Amazingly when I dug out my allergy medicine and looked at the date that I had received it, it was one year ago minus two days. August 19 2008. Allergies are that cyclical!

I am slowly (quickly?) becoming (have already become?) a snivelling, allergic, emaciated weakling academic incapable of stepping outside the confines of dusty, learned halls. Someone who has to go home because "my allergies are too bad". Jokes.

I sit in a very quiet library where there are few people. In fact the only people who usually come into this room are myself, an occasional borrower and the librarian who works in the office next to this room. In the few hours that I sit here in the morning there's usually no more than five people that visit the room.

This morning, however, a librarian came in that I had never seen before. He caeme into the room with one of those book-laden library carts, clearly on a mission to restock some shelves, put some things in binders and reorder a few papers.

Never in my life have I heard a librarian this loud.

Not just the way he slammed books on top of one another, the way he forced pages into binders and then violently snapped them shut and slammed the binders on top of one another, rattling the stacks and his little book cart. Every book that he put on the shelf was done violently, loudly and aggressively.

His feet stomped wherever they went. He had the staccato, heavy breathing of a 13 year old boy humping his parent's couch. If his eyes could have made noise, they would have.

Caveman librarian is too loud for this place. Somewhere in a machine shop there is a quiet, contemplative person silently welding steel.

One strange behavioural pattern that I notice is that people on the streetcar tend to whisper when they are saying something to a stranger. This is beyond just being quiet to avoid shouting in other people's ears. People on the streetcar are so quiet that when they say 'excuse me' it comes out as the barest of whispers that sounds like wind blowing through grass.

I don't know if this is to do with lots of people being packed onto a small bus or if it is a distinctly Toronto, city of immigrants, phenomenon. Austin Clarke writes:

“Around us is the whispering of church and concert congregation. At times like this, after all these years, it is the quietness of this city that makes me feel different, that makes me shiver with that difference”

I experience this quietness all the time and find it strange that people are seemingly unable to speak above 1/100th of a decibel in public. I like it when people actually speak words in public in an audible fashion.

Sometimes I pause and listen to the world and am shocked at how little human noise there is and how much machine noise. Right now sitting on a pretty busy coffee shop patio I can hear truck engines, breaks squeeling, doors opening, cell phones ringing, my keyboard clacking and birds chirping. There isn't a single human noise to be heard. Are we gradually losing our capacity to speak? What's it like where you are?

Of course as soon as I typed that some jerk just came by talking to himself. Be careful what you wish for!

I often read things that make me do a double and triple take in order to properly take in the absurdity of what is being said. Where language is so dense (difficult to penetrate and stupid) and seemingly-complex that the signifier completely overwhelms the signified.

Certainly in a lot of literary theory there are statements that barely scrape the borders of sensibilty. Such as:

“The Real is the fullness of the inert presence, positivity; nothing is lacking in the Real – that is, the lack is introduced only by symbolization […] But at the same time the Real is in itself a hole, a gap, an opening in the middle of the symbolic order – it is the lack around which the symbolic order is structured. […] the real is a sublime object in a strict Lacanian sense – an object which is just an embodiment of the lack in the Other, in the symbolic order. The sublime object is an object which cannot be approached too closely: if we get too near it, it loses its sublime features and becomes an ordinary vulgar object – it can persist only in an interspace, in an intermediate state, viewed from a certain perspective, half-seen”

But at least here we can see that this guy is discussing meta-language, the language of language and to talk about the object of "The Real" which language can only ever mirror or approximate. So in this case I think there is room to be forgiving for a lack of clarity because it is precisely the unclear nature of representation that he is trying to discuss.

But what I find truly inane and ridiculous is a sort of contemporary shop language whereby meaning becomes intentionally obscured in order to make a simple idea (or a non-idea) seem complex. This definitely happens in academia (all the time) but its also persistent in business, advertising, design, news broadcasting, shoemaking, etc... This is a use of language in a way that has all the markings of complexity: multi-syllabic words, seemingly obscure and complex ideas, strange acronyms, ... with none of the content of the same complexity.

Luckily you can typically cut through a lot of this bullshit by asking two questions: 1) Why? 2) What does X mean? - Where X can be 'poly-branding supply strategy', 'multi-perspetival environment generation', 'exceeds the law of non-contradiction', 'the pedagogy of corpora-fascist militarism'. Because if you ask people to explain these flashy terms, there often isn't all that much complexity in the meaning behind the complex words.

And don't get me started on the use of quotations on signs for businesses. Who are you quoting? Who says that you are the "Best movers in Town!" Why is Town capitalized?

/studies too much english

My mom insists on buying me Christmas decorations from all the places she visits. Its a nice gesture but strange to have a "bauble" on a Christmas tree from a place that you have never been. I'm not sure what I'm telling the world when I put a "Lake Placid" ornament on my Christmas tree. Actually, I have been to "Lake Placid" but I wasn't motivated to buy a Christmas ornament when I visited. I was 13 when I visited and I was primarily interested in watching MTV in the Hotel. I couldn't believe how many times they played Bel Biv Devoe.

Anwyay, don't be freaked out when you see a "Newfoundland" Christmas ornament on my tree. I don't know why its there other than out of sheer politeness.

People have also bought me paintings and framed pictures. These are nice gifts in theory but extremely risky gifts. I have never hung any of these paintings or pictures as they didn't match the aesthetics of my house. To me, those kinds of gifts are akin to giving someone a haircut when they're asleep. They may not like what you like.

Waste is the staple and arguably the most profuse product of the liquid modern society of
consumers; among consumer society’s industries waste production is the most massive and the
most immune to crisis. That makes waste disposal one of the two major challenges liquid life has
to confront and tackle. The other major challenge is the threat of being consigned to waste. In a
world filled with consumers and the objects of their consumption, life is hovering uneasily
between the joys of consumption and the horrors of the rubbish heap. (9)

There is a small and relatively unknown island in the South Pacific where all the allegedly great suicidal artists go and live after they have faked their deaths. The cost of residency on the island is high but once there, every great "dead" artist can abandon their previously requisite lives of eccentric creativity and cash out, enjoying the banal lives of consumption and laziness that everyone actually aspires to. David Foster Wallace lies in a hammock all day watching Charles in Charge while Kurt Cobain eats Milk Duds and remixes Venga Boys. Jim Morrison is a Dilbert fanatic. It never gets old.