Space is the Place

A new hope for the human race.



Seriously. I heartily recommend you check out The Phenomenauts.

If the glasses and theramin aren't enough to snare you, Professor Greg Arius is sporting tatoos under his immaculate space-age lab coat and Commander Angel Nova's got the smallest soul patch, sharpest mutton chops and darkest mascara of any rocker. Science and Honor! It's like Devo became explicable.

Delightful Expunging

It tickles the toungue with exuberant excitement! 1975, it was a hot summer and the extruded pipe and wooden slats filled her to tears on the point of gasping. Outrage! Holy rusted metal, Batman! Jesus was a carpenter, could he use BNC cables to splice near field detector arrays? It was all stacked in the hallway, piled haphazardly on top of the defuct and rattling radiator while the external airconditioner deafened passersby.

MITERS; MIT Museum; N52-115

Monitors; manuals; slide projector; aluminum rudder; pipe; slats; boards; ribbon cables; wall warts; piano wire; bnc cables; computer and av cables; lacrosse sticks; oars; joysticks; belt sander; enclosures; keyboards; despair.

(for tim anderson)

In Dreams

I'm trying to remember how I came to be shepherding two small girls around my home town that was strangely urban and really quite like a warzone. I took the littlest one into a dress shop (her father had said she wanted a dress) and encouraged her to try on something monstrously huge and ridiculous (it towered over her like a cypress) and destroy the prissy dress store. We ran away giggling. I woke up in our Japanese hotel, and had to run out into the street in my tabi. The doorman was horrified and polite about keeping up with my mad dashes to let me in and out. But then I found myself bare-ass naked on Norfolk Street and I had to run all the way to CVS (through the Cambridge Festival), arms across my breasts, to go into the CVS/SEARS and buy underwear. Strangely enough, no one noticed. Although I had a hard time turning my impromptu grab of clothes into something fashionable. Last night, I was laying in my bunkbed in a much nicer version of my childhood house, and friends came in and out, because it was the dorm. I'd borrowed Laura's guitar, or was it her laptop, and kept playing this pervasive piece in D-Dorian, like I was playing along to an unsung symphony. But then my time was up, and it was time to go, and I was in a car with a fat, loud, abusive, brutish police officer (the fuckup from Super Troopers meets Gomer Pyle from Full Metal Jacket). He shot a kitten, and wanted to track it down to make sure it stayed dead. He was a yellow and black tabby, like a tiger, and I knew him. And if I could find him, I'd put him in my shirt to dry him off and keep him warm, and he'd purr and we'd both be comforted. So, I tried to thwart the epic pile of loud, smelly, cantakerous, idiotic jackass. I kept pushing him away so we could hear where the injured mewling was coming from over the grinding sounds of his pant legs brushing together, his belt jingling, and the lip-smacking, snorting, constant stream of invective and mouth-breathing. Did I hear the kitten there? A grate? That side street? That building? And in the course of our searching noticed a strange subterranean party at the Hilton, under the grates, and eventually fell into a totally different world. Where the mission was a scavenger hunt, the kitten/person was an old friend. Why he was a cat, I forget. But I lost the fat man early on.

In the sewer world, it was actually a horrible mix of fairy tales and labyrinth. It was triangular. A faerie park in the center. Different quadrants (tridents) stretching out to new and unknown horrors. I was calling into a meta-help line to find out where I was to try to track down Ben. A woman was with me. We were cold and terrified because it was winter on our side-street and we were pretty sure that the nearest labyrinthine entrance led to darkness and Hell and outer-rim like unfortunate mind-numbing terror. We got ahold of a different operator, who told us to turn right and force our way through the snow along the lamps until we came to the University. Which we did. But we found the Debate Club instead, unfurling banners on a bridge across a small river (it was spring, now) arguing about electronic rights and security policies and the involvement of the government. I think. But they promised the University was just down the way. And lo, it was like a breakroom/convenience store (I noticed a pile of MIT yearbooks on the floor). I greedily drank milk-tea and tried to shove down as many pastries as possible. And wanted to fill my pack with everything. My companion complained that she didn't like stale or sugary food, and I had to wonder what we were going to run into and whether it wasn't better to eat while we still could.

And then I was standing on the side of a wooded road near dusk as Joe and Lenny carried a box of long, violet, mylar confetti strings (to make anodization, anodize what?) to the other side and threw in a catalyst. Everything started to pop and spark and as it floated over toward us, it burned. Twinkies started painstakingly gathering up the pieces. The other Laura cackled about her purple glittery laptop. Now the anodization material was in a truck bed floating in the river next to the road. I went over to see what I could find, and there were some beautifully metallic and vibrant roses, petals and bands of silk in the bed, and some of the glitter that was the goal. I took a piece of the fabric, admired how it was magenta at one end and all the spectrum of colors through gray along the length and wound it about my hair, like a cap. Girl with a Pearl Earring. I'm sure I looked ridiculous. And I wondered whatever happened to my kitten. And then I woke up.

The Loathing is Mutual

A closure is a data structure that holds an expression and an environment of variable bindings in which that expression is to be evaluated. The variables may be local or global. Closures are used to represent unevaluated expressions. Proper closure accounts for all the clues and mysteries, leaves no stray ends, makes themes clear, and gives readers a sense that order is again in sight. The ending of a lesson is critical. Because of its position at the end of a lesson, learning can be facilitated or hindered. "Closure" means different things to different people. For the purpose of this training resource, closure is defined as ending a lesson in a way that optimizes learning.


Closure is the false and futile wrap up after a quick drop and a sudden stop. It can't change the situation. For a few minutes, you get to say your piece and try to wrap up irrelevant and loose ends. For a while, it makes you feel better. But it's just more thing to mull over; It wasn't an apology; It wasn't reparation. It still leaves you frustrated. If it were possible to have a meaningful, mutually beneficial conversation, maybe you wouldn't be demanding closure in the first place.


What have I learned?