***FROM THE DESK OF :MR SAWADOGO CAMPOARE,
AUDITING AND ACCOUNTING SECTION,
BANK OF AFRICAN ( B.O.A )
OUAGADOUGOU BURKINA-FASO, WEST AFRICA .
TELLEPHONE CONTACT:(+226-78-34-79-49)

Dear Friend,

This message might meet you in utmost surprise, however,it’s just my urgent need for foreign partner that made me to contact you for this transaction. I am a banker by profession from Burkina faso in west Africa and currently holding the post of Director Auditing and Accounting unit of the bank.

I have the opportunity of transfering the left over funds ($22.5million) of one of my bank clients who died along with his entire family on 31 july 2000 in a plane crash.You can confirm the genuiness of the deceased death by clicking on this web site http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/859479.stm

Hence,i am inviting you for a business deal where this money can be sharedbetween us in the ratio of 60/30 while 10% will be mapped out for expenses. send your private phone number to call you, it shows more trust. If you agree to my business proposal.further details of the transfer will be forwarded to you as soon as i receive your return mail.have a great day.

I want you to call me on phone for more informations
Your Faithfully
Mr  Sawadogo Campoare

***

I feel like I’ve finally come of age on the internet.

Obviously, I always wanted the center theme of it is going to be lamb in a wool sweater, but was concerned that I wouldn’t be able to muster up a definition of it that would be appropriate for an academic paper. Then, lo and behold, a few weeks ago I picked up Douglas Hofstadter’s book I am a Strange Loop, and it begun. What I had previously failed to realize is that the way to come at a proper definition is, instead of endlessly listing examples, as I had been (and which is fine for getting people to understand without getting to creepy and aluminum foil hatted) what I really needed to do was to combine theories. I can come at it by defining which parts of other’s theories it is and which parts it is not (I should have realized this earlier, when Scott described it as irony/tautology/a bunch of other things but…hairier).

So here’s what I have so far (these are some texts I’ll be using, but by no means all). Basically the definition will exist in the section of the Venn Diagramm of all these texts where they all overlap.

-Hofstader’s theories of loops in consciousness

-Godel’s Proof

-Revelations

-Freud’s Theories of the Sublime and the Uncanny (the section on doppelgangers, mostly)

-Some text on semiotics that fits my needs

-other stuff

what I’m defining it right now as is: loops in the subconsciousness that are manifested in cultural signs as they relate to the infinite and apocalypse fear. and literature. what the fuck am I getting myself into? Yipes.

so we’ve descended back into bad weather here in the big apple, at least for today. lightning tomorrow, then hopefully back to sunny-sun-sun? c’mon pleeze.
i jumped on the pirate bay bandwagon way too late, but just soon enough to download bruce springsteen’s greatest hits. i do what i want.
this is what happens when you’re raised in the closest thing to a blue-collar family on stanford campus (we had a mutt dog, christmas lights, e street band family dance parties where we opened all the windows, and a lawn *banjo twangs, rooster crows, be-spandexed man on a recumbent bike pedals by*)
…I aint looking for praise or pity
I aint coming round searching for a crutch
I just want someone to talk to
And a little of that human touch
Just a little of that human touch…

AND SOMEBODY HAS BEEN TELLING LIES ABOUT ME AND I THINK IT IS YOU! YOU ARE A SLUT AND I HATE YOU!

here is the original video (I have decided that I am somehow going to obtain the dress she wears at 2:36 and wear it to every single one of my poetry readings):

Oh Silvia. Come to America! True, we like our fabulous trainwrecks a little bit less tongue-in-cheek. THE SONG IS ABOUT WINNING EUROVISION AND SHE LOST.

“hello, God? what’s up, dog? It’s our favorite person in the world! Silvia Night!”

in case anyone is confused, here is a new york times article about the Eurovision song contest.

and the official Silvia Night-International Superstar, homepage.

YES.

it’s the berenstain bears  model of marriage and familyhood, a model which was very comforting to me in my childhood because it exactly replicated what i saw going on while growing up. organized, disciplinarian mom, hapless, permissive, dad. mom is just going to finish the laundry and pick you up from school on the way home from work and make you go over your homework assignments and get in screaming, crying fights with you until the second she leaves for the weekend on business and dad buys a huge bag of mint pastels that you then hide behind the toaster oven when mom gets home until you find them melted into a amorphous brown brick three months later.

oh, f*ck.

i won’t go into how this all turned out, but suffice it to say that i honestly don’t know if reversed roles would really work much better (as anyone who’s ever seen crumb knows, growing up with a hard-ass father doesn’t make anyone any saner).  is this just a post-feminist reversal of the same old thing? does there have to be this kind of good-cop bad-cop method when it comes to parenting? and how the fuck did i go from worrying about my own disorganization to doling out shallow analysis of turn of the century family politics?

where am I?

what time is it?

State-ahs, state-ahs, state-ahs, state-ahs, state-ahs,
Stay the fuck off the road, money!!

ooooh my god! can you imagine!!!??

not even remotely related! go team!

via This is Why You’re Fat

i guess there’s some kind of art gathering going on in the city this week, and so, as is typical with conferrence of creative types, there were some parties. my friend paul is in town, and this girl (becca) he knew back in LA (who apparently lived a block down hoover from me but who i never knew) invited us to a gallery shindig on the chelsea pier.

ok. before i start bitching, let me just say that as we were approaching the hudson, in the newly balmy (god, what passes for balmy these days with me) springish water-touched air, i announced to the group that the only real thing i wanted was to be on a boat, right then. and lo and behold, the very gallery we were headed to turned out to be on…a boat! damn! when do my ridiculous demands ever get immediately fulfilled! last night, that’s when (i tried to stretch my good luck by proclaiming that i wanted free alcohol, but that turned out to be a bust)

also, while we’re on the subject, i heard this snippet from a friend of becca’s (also from LA)

“i went through a phase where i only dated guys with boats. but then i realized that boats aren’t everything.”

with segues PERFECTLY into the point of the story, which is that I Don’t Understand Art People. i really thought i did! i had some sort of The Last Avante Garde type fantasy in which we could all drink and investigate the color orange together and i was ten times more talented/socially capable than i actually am and there wasn’t a dead mouse in my kitchen and i wore nice clothes and didn’t have a sore throat and actually even KNEW of a guy that had a boat.

there was a girl with an american flag bikini dancing on a pedestal, a bunch of french girls in paint and feathers who pushed in front of me at the bar and who i would have punched in the face if i wasn’t secretly terrified of all french people, loud house music, and mostly sort of “meh” art.

however, there was also a tugboat you could sit and smoke on, a dude with a long beard playing a portable electric guitar, beer mixed with whiskey (i hope) in gallon poland spring jugs down in “the murder room,” free scraps of cloth with things painted on them, a guy that yelled “EXCUSE ME SIR, WOULD YOU SHOW ME TO THE ENGINE ROOM” out in the darkness, and a good view of the LCD display at the Chelsea Piers, which intermittently flashed the word “SKILLS!”

afterwards, we went to an irish themed lesbian bar in park slope.

i guess it was a pretty good night.