video

i watched all of britney spears' music videos recently. i watched them all several times.

the more i watched, the less sense they all made. in oops i did it again, britney spears is actually an alien from mars. the guy who finds her is an astronaut wearing a space suit. britney takes off his helmet: he doesn't die. he's supposed to be on mars.

in toxic, britney breaks into some secret laboratory to steal some toxic thing. then she feeds it to a man and jumps out of the window. the camera then zooms back and she is back as an airplane stewardess. she winks at the camera. was it all a flashback? some phantasmagoria in the mind of a bored trolley dolly? what does the toxic thing do?

we accept a lot when we watch music videos.


new ton

read issac newton by james gleick. tim makes a good point about how well newton would have done in this day and age with computers and money, whereas things like paper was scarce in newton's days. the thing that interests me more is that newton had to invent a language to talk about what he found. he had to define distance (a foot in paris was different to a foot in london, and gallieo used cubits and others just used what ever the hell they wanted), he had to define time (he used a pendulum) he had to define the difference between speed, velocity, acceleration, force, power, weight, mass using books written in latin, french, italian and arabic.

i kept thinking of orwell's 1984, where the government is trying to control thought through language. it kind of gives you hope that we as humans can use the force of our intellect to create words for concepts that we barely understand, but are infinitely tangible.

look! there's a pollywobble!


check off

read the student, the 2 volodyas, the grasshopper and ariadna by anton chekov. they were all short stories. the student is recommended by bloom. i have just one word to describe them. they were very chekovian.

(everyone should read the student because it is less than 3 pages long, then you can tell everyone you've read chekov and start calling things chekovian. that new britney spears video: very chekovian.)


can't sing

2 songs i can't sing without lying.

neil young - old man.
4 non blondes - what's going on.


j page

are you sure you weren't eating in front of a mirror?