Ugly Blog

“Homo vult decipi; decipiatur.”

Through years of traveling the world and writing articles in magazines, I’ve developed psychic powers. I can influence your actions by controlling the cadence of the text on the page as you read it. Unlike some charlatan astrologers, psychics and witch doctors, my skill is based in science, a lifetime of studying how the rhythm of language influences brainwaves, particularly certain passages buried deep within the English language, passages that were dictated to me by an old woman, a hermeneutic. The study of those passages demanded supreme scholarship to interpret, years of intense application, and it has still not been wholly worked out. In order to help me, the old woman gave birth to my grandmother, who bore my mother. When my mother gave birth to me, there I was, deciphering the dictations of the old woman.

Continue reading Magic

First a rant — forgive me, I’m flying and can’t help myself but marvel at the magnificently low IQ of the people in charge of airport security.  Because the latest attempt to bring down an airplane involved starting a fire in the last hour of the flight, now we can’t get out of our seats during the last hour. When the attempt included a shoe, everyone’s shoes got checked. After the liquid plot, liquids. Always fighting the last “war,” no matter how ridiculous a category.

If anything, after 911 airport security should have been DECREASED, except for bomb sniffing dogs, as now passengers will mob and kill any hijacker on sight instead of obeying like sheep and waiting for the authorities to handle it, as they were taught to before.

Continue reading Terrorists and bladders

I’ve always found it puzzling that my Christian friends find it puzzling that I celebrate Christmas even though I’m not a Christian. Or that my Jewish or Muslim friends correct me when I wish them a Merry Christmas. Christmas is a time for family, which is always a great excuse for a holiday. And, growing up, our Christmas was the sort of pantheist hodge-podge that only a family of atheists would come up with, including gefilte fish during Christmas dinner right after a specifically Slovak garlic-wafer-honey ritual that wards of demons and has fused with Catholic communion ideas, a Buddha and a Shiva on the mantle next to the Nativity scene, and so on. But in doing some research today to verify a suspicion that Christmas is already a pantheist hodge-podge (or “synthesis,” see below), I came across something that warms the religious cockles of my heart: that Santa is Odin in disguise.

Of all the gods, the only one that even as a kid I could ever imagine worshipping was Odin, but I’d thought him dead. And here I found he’s been hiding under my nose every Christmas for 38 years. This makes me happy: I can join all my friends in having a touch of religion, even if nostalgic childhood-ish religion, in my Christmas.

Continue reading Santa, Odin and the Castrated Chicken

A brand used to be a symbol burned onto a cow’s butt. [When] a ranch had a long-standing reputation of raising healthy cows, the brand was its symbol of quality. But once the “-ing” was added to the word “brand,” and agencies started to ply the black art of “branding,” a brand was no longer the symbol of quality and reputation earned over time. Instead it was something that was just made up by ad agency creatives applying ingenuity to the disingenuous.”

— Augustine Fou

When people who are paid to opine wake up to a new industry dynamic, they often overreact. As pundits on the periphery of the branding industry belatedly noticed consumers exchanging information directly via Facebook, Twitter, and other social media, the field began to echo with shouts of “Branding is dead!”

I don’t buy that argument. Would you, if I could name an $80 billion market that gets customers to pay between one and ten thousand times the price of an identical competing product, with nothing to differentiate the two except for 100% pure clean branding?

No, it’s not art, though I’ll come back to art later. It’s bottled water.

Continue reading The Brand Is Dead! Long Live the Brand!

Over the years the people I’ve met who self-identify as “anarchists” tend to be among the dumbest and the smartest people I’ve had the pleasure or displeasure of knowing. Very few reasonable people attach that label to themselves. In an attempt to avoid being lumped with the dumbest, I thought I’d distill my reasons for doing so, from the least to the most important.

1. Anarchism as the conscience of law. Given democratic notions of legitimacy, the fewer people who believe in “the rule of law” (i.e., the more who believe it is just a veiled imposition of power), the more transparent the veil, and the more the law has to obey its own rules in order to maintain legitimacy. When rule-of-law marketing and propaganda are insufficient to create legitimacy, the powerful have to limit the arbitrary use of their power and shrink the number of cases they can treat as extraordinary. Anarchists weaken the faith element within law, and by doing so force it to obey its own rules.

Continue reading The Happy Anarchist

After Boing Boing blogged, yes, Boing Boing blogged, about Ralph Lauren’s most recent photoshop disaster, they (obviously) included the photo. The one over there, on the left, with the model whose head is larger than her entire pelvis.

Continue reading Doing my bit for mockery

After tearing a tendon in my wrist I found myself running up the 2,830-step natural stairmaster behind my house called the Grouse Grind. Though I’ve always disliked cardio, there’s something surprisingly pleasant in the hour-long vertical hike — what, between the trees and view and the beer at the end of it. Okay, well, to be honest the hike isn’t pleasant at all, but the beer at the end, that’s worth it. Those post-hike endorphins become a magical ingredient when mixed with the beer, a slow-earned brew that can only be enjoyed the hard way. (I tried taking the gondola once, and the beer was definitely mediocre without the endorphins — but with them, I’d rank their brew higher than the finest hop-houses in Prague, better than the best beerswills in Brussels.)

Continue reading Grouse Grinch — Or Asshole Customer?

One of the very best things that can happen to a thinking person is to have his assumptions flipped. When I met Damien Hirst on Bali’s Brawa Beach, where he was finishing an intense three-month painting session, I expected him to have a bumper sticker on his laptop that said, “Suck my cock vomit.” Which he did. But I didn’t expect him to be extraordinarily down-to-earth, generous, and aware of his own position in a way that is caring rather than cynical.

This interview is the first he’s given since deciding here in Bali to stop all his production pieces in order to focus on making his own paintings. In the process, it touches on everything from the suicide of his close friend to the essence of painting to five-foot wooden giraffes—with a detour on the nature of visual language using Vaseline and a cucumber.

Alexander Boldizar: So you’ve stopped your production?

Damien Hirst: Yeah, I’ve stopped it all.

Continue reading Damien Hirst: New Paintings (Interview)

The desire for security stands against every great and noble enterprise. —Tacitus

In New York City you can get a ticket for sitting on a milk crate or taking up two seats on a subway or putting on a puppet show visible from the street or climbing a tree or driving a taxi while wearing shorts. NYPD officers walk through the stairwells of housing projects where crack gangs once ruled, not with drug dogs but with decibel-meters to hand out tickets to teenagers playing their music too loud. Central Park was once both dangerous and beautiful, but now someone has installed a fence every ten meters and it feels less natural than even the densest maze of Brooklyn concrete.

During my four years in New York, I walked alone at night into five or six of the worst projects in Brownsville, East New York, Harlem and the Bronx (to interview people), and I never experienced a moment of fear—something that only an escapee from a mental institution could have said fifteen years earlier.

Continue reading Fear.

My new novel, The Man Who Saw Seconds, is finished. And my agent turned it down because it’s science fiction, and she doesn’t do science fiction. I feel very grateful to have the agent I have–The Ugly is a difficult book, and finding an agent who cares about literature more than money is rare, unusual, extraordinarily lucky.

And yet I can’t help feeling a bit of frustration at the way we all put ourselves in boxes. Why can’t the same author write both heavy stuff and thrillers? Comments I’ve received from other published writers who’ve been kind enough to give me their time as readers included, “I was irritated whenever I had to put it down,” “It would/will make an amazing film,” and “I’m stunned your agent wasn’t completely hooked. I certainly am.”

Again, I have a great agent. She just doesn’t do sci-fi. She suggested I work with her for my literary fiction, and find another agent for my commercial fiction. So…I’m looking for a sci-fi agent. And perhaps a pseudonym.

Manny Lampnut? Bald Lazier Ox? Roland Lulfromulber? Radix Loblaze? Continue reading Looking for a Sci-Fi Agent…

I’m afraid of technology. Not of the Terminator, smart machines, genetic engineering or even the self-replicating gray nano goo that Bill Joy, founder of Sun Microsystems, famously worried about in a 2000 Wired article, “Why the future doesn’t need us.”

I’m afraid of something much simpler: the personal computer. Specifically, way it interacts with the human brain. There has always been a tendency among children, elementary-school teachers and policemen to think in simple terms of right and wrong, in checklists and keywords and similar boxes. It’s a way of avoiding thinking.

At the end of law school, all of us who came from national schools took a ten-week Bar Bri course to learn the state law that students at state schools had been studying for three years. The one thing the Bar Bri instructors explicitly drilled into our heads was “Don’t think. Memorize and repeat keywords. Whatever you do, do NOT try to think on the test. You will only be punished for it.”

Continue reading The real danger of technology

Or…How I Beat Candida and Incidentally Lost 60 Pounds

As a manly man, it’s a bit shameful to admit you count anything, let alone something as vain as carbs or calories. In reality, a manly man has many layers. On the surface, it’s important to pretend you can’t count anything. You face what comes, whether it’s the next beer or the next opponent, without worrying about long-term issues like being outnumbered or running out of beer. Under that surface, a manly man is highly intelligent, of course, and understands exactly what’s going on — it’s only for honour’s sake that he doesn’t allow himself to access that information.

Still, even a manly man eats. And that eating includes choices. As the author of The Ugly, I tried for a long time to keep my body as close to that of Muzhduk’s as I could. I was unable to reach 300 lbs, but so long as I was over 260, with enough muscle to perform parlour tricks like lifting Honda Civics, I was happy.

Then something happened that dropped me down to 205. I lost most of my body fat while retaining all my lean muscle mass. To my chagrin, I can now count eight individual muscles in my abdomen. The good news is I haven’t lost strength. The bad news is that now I look, well, thin.

Continue reading The manly man’s mushroom diet

After decades of research, physicists have finally captured a photo of Emptiness.

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As a writer who needs to freelance in order to pay the bills, I’ve developed two distinct (opposite, in fact) modes of working.

One is the “manager” mode that recently got an “out of memory” error on my 4gig laptop–I was running with 50 Adobe documents open, 50 Excel documents, most with multiple sheets, 140 tabs on Firefox, 19 Word documents, one very long Power Point slide show, and a bunch of other stuff open, all with my son running in and out showing me the good guy beating the bad guy, informing me that “Dad, these superheroes saved the day!” and asking the names of odd colours, like fuchsia. I told him to ask his mother, she’s a painter, she paints with colours. He said, “And you’re a writer? So you know what’s right?”

Continue reading Why I hate meetings — half the time

Reuters is reporting that “Farmers in an eastern Indian state have asked their unmarried daughters to plow parched fields naked in a bid to embarrass the weather gods to bring some badly needed monsoon rain, officials said on Thursday.”

Continue reading Among the things the 3rd world does far better than the West…

If you want happiness for an hour—take a nap.
If you want happiness for a day—go fishing.
If you want happiness for a month—get married.
If you want happiness for a year—inherit a fortune.
If you want happiness for a lifetime—help someone else.

—Chinese proverb

First, lift your cheeks, as though you were winking with them. Then raise the ends of your lips obliquely…

Continue reading Happiness.

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“Today I met with a subliminal advertising executive for just a second.”

- Steven Wright

Heroin needle vans are hard to find. I tried once in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It was illegal for University Health Services to sell me needles directly, so they suggested the van and made several phone calls on my behalf trying, and failing, to find out on what corner it stopped, when, and for how long. Eventually, I got my free needles–after a week of research–but remember thinking that the HIV-prevention program must be a complete failure. If it was that difficult for a Harvard Law student planning a trip to Africa to find the van, what chance did a junked-up heroin addict who injected six times a day have?

Continue reading The World Wide Web of World of Mouth

A response of sorts to Stanley Fish’s column, Fathers, Sons and Motorcycles.

I have never in my life had a sentimental attachment to an object — I’ve never spent more than four years of my life in one city, and leave objects behind constantly. But then I bought my motorcycle.

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Continue reading Motorcycles and Authenticity

With the senators of Montana suddenly terrified over the prospect of terrorists being housed in maximum-security prisons within their borders, with Cheney going into fear-generation overdrive, and with John Podhortez at Commentary asserting that “Fear was an entirely responsible response to September 11,” I think it’s time to take a step back and ask, “Is it really?”

Even with statistical spikes like 9/11, over the past fifty years the same number of Americans have been killed by lightning as by terrorism, both of which are dwarfed by deaths from food allergies, drowning in your own bathtub, or even lying in bed doing nothing and getting killed by, say, a collapsing roof. There would have to be one 9/11 per month in order for terrorism to equal the risk of driving even on the world’s safest roads (rural highways in the West), and two per week in order to equal the risk of driving in India.

Continue reading Fear was NOT a reasonable response to 9/11.

In finishing up my new science fiction novel I went through a lot of research on Laplace’s Demon. In the process, I stumbled onto the computational limit of the universe. Based on the minimum amount of time you need to move data across the Planck length, at the speed of light, there’s a limit to the computational power of the universe that’s about 10-to-the-power-of-120 bits (actually 10^120 operations on 10^90 bits of data). Anything needing more data can’t be computed in the fifteen billion years or so that the universe has existed so far. Ergo, omniscience is impossible even for a computing organism the size and age of the universe.

Continue reading Accidental Proof that God Does Not Exist

You know that the age of big brother, or big spouse, is truly here when no-fee and no-registration websites spring up for the purpose of tracking your partner. I’m not going to embed this link, because the URL says it all: http://www.trackapartner.com/

Continue reading The Age of Big Partner

North Dakota, always the cutting-edge of enlightened thinking, just passed a law that would punish parents criminally if their children skip school.

The legislation allows for a fine of up to $500 against parents who allow their children to miss class. Repeat offenders could get 30 days in jail and a $1,000 fine.

Continue reading Even zero thinks it’s a number

Ortega y Gasset wrote that society, like every collective, is a great soulless entity. It is humanity that has been mechanized, almost mineralized.  And that, in a nutshell, is exactly what went wrong with the housing bubble. Continue reading An anarchist solution to the banking crisis

The origins of modern Law stem from the Holy Roman Emperor, who in the 12^th century sought a way to define his power for all to see, but without giving the role to the Pope because he feared that that would define the Pope as a greater power. So he declared that the right to define an Emperor’s power belonged only to the Law, which was in the keeping of a community of Masters who studied the principles of reason in an Ivory Tower in Bologna. The Emperor declared these scholars to be independent of his own power. In exchange, they announced that, according to Rationality and the Law, the Emperor was the only true representative of the only true Law, so whatever pleases the Emperor is the Law. And the Pope was left out. Continue reading Was Bush good for the rule of Law?

The Indonesian version of Candid Camera recently did two skits back to back that showed the two sides of living here.

In the first skit, fifty men ran down the road and grabbed an unsuspecting stranger walking alone down the street in Jakarta. They picked him up, jiggled him around, carried him for a block, and then put him down. A few of the “victims” tried to fight at first, but all gave in very quickly. Candid Camera Indonesia did this skit five times with five different men. When they were put back down, four out of the five joined the mob and ran amok with it to find new victims, having no idea that it was all a joke. Continue reading Candid Camera — Indonesian version

So David Bennett lost his 77lb bag of lizard poop. “To some people it might have been just a bag of lizard shit, but to me it represented seven years of painstaking work searching the rainforest with a team of reformed poachers to find the faeces of one of the world’s largest, rarest and most mysterious lizards.” Continue reading Gross negligence

I saw the types of people who became president of the Harvard Law Review. Sometimes, very late at night, the whole lot would pass by, in and out of whitewashed little Gannet House, on skinny pale legs permanently damaged by a year of subciting — Hieronymous Bosch figurines amputated by Odd Nerdrum. They were not the type of people who knew how to throw a punch. Continue reading Obama meets Odd

Just found out that “more attention to breasts builds long-term bonds through a cocktail of ancient neuropeptides.” And this after years of being told “I’m up here,” after conforming to the weird cultural taboo that said looking at the ocular regions was morally superior to looking at mammary regions.

It has always seemed a weird religious leftover to judge the face as more “me” than other body parts — stunted leftovers from Neoplatonism via the Scholastics and Descartes (basically everyone who twisted philosophy in the service of religion) and all the other mind-body dualists. Sure, the face deserves some attention — it has a higher sensory density than most other body parts. But so do the hands and genitals. Continue reading Ode to ogling

So far I’ve found three downsides to atheism besides the obvious, if cynical, problems with being on the losing end of Pascal’s wager:

1. Nobody to talk to during sex.

Continue reading The drawbacks of atheism

I’ve counted 14 colonies of ants attacking simultaneously. Tens of thousands have died, but they keep coming. Continue reading Ants!