Yes, this is still whoknew.us as always. We have had a technical meltdown of sorts. There is no leaking radiation (as such) but it will take a while to restore order. Though I have not added content to this blog for some time I know that there are many links coming in and search results bringing unwitting people here, so I do intend to bring the site back to some semblance of its previous self.

Thanks,
Jeremy.

Sometime back in the 1980s, Cara played for me a scary record she had by a guy name Jandek (apparently pronounced in a completely non-European way: `Jan` as in Jan Brady, `dek` as in deck of cards). To put it briefly, if you don’t know his work, it sounded like a gentle psychotic person playing around with a guitar, a microphone, and a tape recorder. We would occasionally put the record on just to spook each other, as if it were Vincent Price reading Poe (but scarier). It never lasted more than a minute.
I cannot honestly recommend you listen to Jandek, but it’s impossible not to be fascinated by the fact that he has put out albums of this stuff without letup for the past 30 years — I believe there are 52 of them. And you can only get them by mail from the man himself.

Alternative rockers and other artsy types like to mythologize him, and his reclusiveness adds to the mystique. Search ‘Jandek’ on Youtube to get a taste of the guy. Theories, of course, abound. I did a little Googling and heard an extremely rare audio interview with the guy (who, I read elsewhere, is probably named Sterling R. Smith) and now I have a theory.

He sounds very lucid and very normal. He also sounds very concrete, and not overtly interested in his own music or whether anyone listens to it. So, as much as it’s tempting and titillating to think of him as a psychopath with a tape recorder, or a misunderstood avant garde genius, my theory is something more prosaic…

The following is my theory, by me: so here it is; a theory about Jandek that’s my own, created by me…about Jandek. It’s not someone else’s theory, or based on someone else’s theory, but one of my own, totally by me, about Jandek. It is, and by “it” I’m referring to my theory, the one about Jandek, the one that is my theory, by me alone, as follows (hat tip: John Cleese):

I’m going to guess that he is an intelligent guy with a mild mental illness, or someone on the very mild end of the autistic spectrum. I think he has a strong and enduring drive to make poetry and music but lacks the organization and creativity to learn an instrument or to develop ideas in a structured way.

His drive to create won’t go away, however, so he indulges it. His mental deficits won’t allow him to get past the initial brainstorming phase, so he records that and releases these recordings semi-publicly, thereby giving substance and force to what would otherwise be something like meditation, or exercises in therapeutic daydreaming.
His guitar playing is deliberate, but completely devoid of any externally defined or even internally premeditated musical technique or structure.

I’d call it the musical equivalent of playing with food. This brings me to another observation I’ve made, which is that anything becomes artistically interesting when collected in large quantity, or focused in on. I realized this one day when I saw a photography studio whose storefront window was filled with hundreds of empty black plastic 35mm film containers. This was a joy to behold. I suspect, similarly, that if you made thousands of hours of film of yourself playing with peas and mashed potatoes on your plate, the artistic world would have to take notice.

This is not to say that Jandek has no poetic talent (though I’m not sure he has any musical talent), but what’s interesting about his recordings is the apparent lack of any attempt to impose any structure or development to his output. It’s just a very large collection of recorded manifestations of a brain’s creative impulses. It gives him some kind of solace to feel the artistic cortex of his brain firing its synapses, and releasing records enhances this process. And his fans find a similar satisfaction in experiencing this kind of abstract induction of electro-chemical activity within similar synapses.
Personally, I’d rather spend my time doing other things. But I think I get it now.

UPDATE: His release of one of his songs with a somewhat crafted lyric, and sung by a woman who can actually sing, strikes me as strongly supporting my theory; what I get from this is that he has no objection to his work being turned into something recognizable as music or poetry, so he’s not really devoted to surrealism or atonal music, nor does he have an axe to grind with the conventional world. The distinction is simply not meaningful or relevant to him.

A story about a soon-to-be-released jetpack will greatly disappoint my lovely wife Cara who, never forgetting a promise made to the wide-eyed little girl she once was that the skies would some day be a joyous carnival of smiling travelers soaring and looping their way to and fro with the aid of their rocket-powered knapsacks, has been marking time in a Dickensian vigil of forbearance for the glorious day that never arrives.
The story turns out, you see, to be a shockingly cruel tease. To the heartbroken, a wanton metaphor is as good as a sharp stick in the eye. No one, except maybe Glenn Reynolds, understands her pain.
Still, sounds kinda cool. It should be a bit easier to create plugins for Mozilla Firefox.

Cara and I once again had occasion to spend the evening with Michael Totten and Judith Weiss and a number of other great people in NYC. We had an excellent time chatting over drinks and assorted bar snacks at Fraunce’s Tavern, followed by a visit to some other bar in lower Manhattan.
Michael is, as ever, a great guy to hang out with, despite his ever increasing stature as a globe trekking journalist. He just does not carry the arrogance gene, unlike many other writers and journalists. Which is nice.
And it was great to see Judith again. She has been single-handedly keeping the liberal hawks of the greater New York Metropolitan area Keshered up for years now, and we’re grateful she keeps us in the loop.
We had not previously met any of the others present, but they were all great company too. Here are a few highlights:
Michael, prompted to tell us about his travels with Hitchens, told us he’d never been more afraid he was going to die than when being attacked by Syrian fascists after Hitchens wrote an obscenity on one of their (already obscene) posters in Lebanon. They evidently had decided to simply make a gesture of brutality by beating Hitchens down. Had Michael and Hitchens been anonymous Lebanese citizens, rather than western journalists, it would probably have been a much more bloody encounter.
Other than using more than my share of butane from Michael’s souvenir Portland, Oregon lighter to get my cigar lit evenly, I think I can say I was a much less costly smoking buddy. Enjoying a tobacco break across the street from ground zero, however, made small talk unrelated to war an impossibility.
Also present were:
A very nice and witty guy named Evan, who we eventually realized was this Evan. Evan advised us that one’s left wing friends will tolerate one’s conservative films but only until those conservative films become popular.
Kejda charmed and entertained us all with insights and anecdotes related to her childhood in Albania and her work as an editor at Commentary. She is, among other things, a self-proclaimed bidet evangelist. Mention any subject to her and, along with an erudite opinion, she will reach into her purse and produce a picture (and yes, that includes the topic of Albania’s superior toileting hardware).
Another new friend of ours is kejda’s husband Michael, a database guru whose company will one day make it possible to use the internet to find out where your brother-in-law left his car keys, and whose definition of a blowout sale on hard drives is when the price dips below a hundred and eighty thousand dollars for 500 gigs.
We also befriended an evil Zionist college professor (or at least that’s what some of her students would call her, on account of her defending the right of Israel to exist). I suck at remembering names unless people send me their URLs via their mysterious pocket gadgets. Cara remembers her name but is at work at the moment. Sorry about that.
I had a nice chat with Steve, who tours the internet in search of discourse and tries to avoid venues where ranting and spewing prevail.
And there were other worthy attendees who I am less able to name, praise, or caricature, but whose presence I enjoyed.
Mini golf in Belchertown would have been fun too, or attending the world’s largest pancake breakfast, but I’m glad we went down to the big city instead.

I have figured something out: blogging used to be a kind of purgative for me. I would vent, evacuate, unload, purge…then pull the chain.
There’s a fragmented line in Happiness is a Warm Gun: “…a soap impression of his wife which he ate and donated to the National Trust.” If “donating to the National Trust” is not a witty metaphor for going to the bathroom, then it should be. And eating soap, I have been told, is something soldiers have sometimes done to get a day off from combat. But I’m digressing in a particularly icky way here.
My point is this: if a person could be inspired to use his blog as a place to put the products of his healthy and creative self, and thereby offer nice things to nice people, then that might be better. Use the blog as a kitchen, in other words, not so much as the aforementioned plumbing nexus. Maybe I’ve done that in spite of myself from time to time, but why not make it a feature instead of a bug. So let’s go ahead and make that a manifesto.

It’s nice that you can put all your eggs into the Google basket. But it’s not nice when your basket is suddenly missing.
This morning I have not been able to check my email, read past emails, can’t get to Google news…
And it’s rather disconcerting that my first effort to find out if it was a problem on my end was to do a Google search to find sites with live updates on Google’s status. That didn’t work out too well. But I found a couple of ways to find out if other people are having Google trouble and so I thought I’d share them with you:
I found this blog post: No Google for You!
And realized that I can, in future, search that site for posts tagged ‘Google’ or ‘Gmail’ when this sort of thing occurs.
Searching for Google got me this info:

In the States, I’ve heard from users in NYC, Chicago, and San Francisco. They all report that Google searches were running at historically low speeds. I’ve heard similar reports from users Europe and Australia.
In addition, Google services like Google News and Gmail are completely failing. The Internet Storm Center is saying that it’s received multiple “reports of a total fail of Google Applications. Gmail, Reader, Docs, News, Apps. etc.”

So that’s another highly valuable resource: The Internet Storm Center.
Summary: Google is down, Whoknew.us is up.

I don’t generally conjure mental images of other bloggers in the shower (particularly not male ones. Does that make any sense? How can I never do something one way and then never do it even more a different way? And am I the only one who finds that this kind of internal Normologue {I just coined that term} tends to occur in me after reading Normblog?)
Disclosure: I can’t say for sure that I have never conjured mental images of other bloggers while I was in the shower. But I think that’s more socially benign.
But this thing of noticing that the quotidian world (I never use the word ‘quotidian’ usually) is peppered with clues for us about competing epistemologies regarding human society and stuff (honestly, I dropped out of a masters program in English Lit. so I wouldn’t have to use phrases like that anymore, but the brain damage is apparently irreversible) made me decide to blog about one such thing that just happened to me this evening, while I was shopping online for air conditioner parts in my pajamas (though how those air conditioner parts got in my pajamas…)
Our Saturn needs a new a/c receiver/drier/accumulator thingy. I found the one pictured below; see if you can find what’s wrong with this picture, and why it reminds me, just as Norm’s shower experience reminded him, that totalitarianism is like crazy wrong, even stupid wrong:

The title of this post gives it away. For some reason I now have the musical phrase “change your sausage” in my head (I can’t find a link, but for those of you who may be culturally deprived, I’m referring to an old TV commercial for a frozen sausage product in which “change your sausage” was sung to the tune of the word “Hallelujah” from Handel’s Messiah. And if that’s not a clue as to the superiority of American capitalism to other forms of society, then…I don’t even know what.)
UPDATE: I said I can’t find a link! Get it?! A link!

Well, I hear Little Green Footballs is at the center of a doctored photo controversy (this time unwittingly). I’m not going to get involved in the main issue at hand, i.e., whether certain European individuals have Nazi sympathies or whether Charles Johnson is being unfair or paranoid. I really don’t have any relevant knowledge or insight.
But I’m always intrigued when it comes to Photoshop subterfuge. There are two photos, both of which appear genuine, but one of which must be faked. Here they are with a particular section I have highlighted for analysis:

My first impression was that this is a first rate job of Photoshopping. And I found a number of areas in the photos that offer clues as to which is the fake, but I share with you one that looks suspicious in both photos (until you really zoom in close).
If you notice the boundary between the coat sleeve and the background in the lower picture, it looks suspiciously foggy, or blurry at the edge. So this could have been a sign of manipulation, whereas the same boundary in the upper photo is nice and crisp.
If you’ve tried to create fake photos (just for fun, I hope) you’ll know that it’s really difficult to select a person, paste them onto a background, and make it look genuine. It’s the border between the two that can suck away hours of your life as you blend, smooth, soften, apply the healing brush, paint single pixels, etc. To do this perfectly, so that it’s completely undetectable, is a major project on the order of restoring a painting. It would have to be that important to you. So you can almost always find evidence of that point in the process at which the perpetrator realized that life was too short to spend another 3 hours getting every pixel in place.
The links below are to screen captures of the above selections from each picture. Note that I didn’t enlarge the pictures, since that would have caused the pixels to be resampled. Instead, I cropped down to the selections and then zoomed the view up to 1600%, then took screen captures of the zoomed views. I saved the screen captures as .tif images with lossless compression. It would be annoying, if even possible, to paste them into this post, so you can open or download them per the links below:

Exhibit A (parade photo)
Exhibit B (cityscape photo)
I made some crude arrows to show the points of interest. What I found was that the apparent fog around the boundary in the photo with the cityscape background looks like distortion from jpg compression. In the version with the parade in the background, what you begin to see are examples of bits of color from the background swapped with bits of color from the foreground. And on the lower right, about 5 pixels to the right of my vertical arrow, you can see a section where these blended pixel colors follow a rigid vertical line, which is not typical of jpg distortion, but very typical of human manipulation.
I found a number of other clues, but this was one of the more interesting ones.
So my conclusion is that the photo with the parade in the background is the fake. This makes sense. Disregarding the character or sympathies of the subjects, that particular stiff smiling pose just doesn’t seem natural in front of an angry parade of protestors; it looks exactly like a posed publicity shot in front of a pleasant but meaningless backdrop. So if I went into this with prejudice, it went only as deep as that.

I was experimenting with an easier way to post entries here but I’m afraid I had underestimated the dark forces with which I was toying. So I unintentionally deleted my previous post. My generation has wisdom for this type of situation: ‘whatever.’
I will continue playing with fire and have some more posts for Monday morning. Just in case you’re noticing.