bjournal

Marvel and DC comics are putting out a special team-up issue - not a comic book, but a legal brief. It seems that they own the copyright to the term Super Hero. Yep, using the term in your independent comic might get you sued. Super Hero Happy Hour from GeekPunk had to change it's name (to Hero Happy Hour) after DC and Marvel gave 'em the ol' legal slapdown.

March 20^th

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Black Plastic Kite

I don't know if this is an allegory or a slimily or a palindrome or whatever, but now that I think of it, I think it might mean something.

When I was eight years old, a guy came to our class to show us how to make kites. He wore a tie-dyed shirt, but I still knew him as Mr. Eddie, the teacher from my other class.

We had piles of paper, sticks and string. Mr. Eddie showed everyone how kites were diamond shaped and had a sort of cross for their skeleton. The paper was newsprint and ripped really easily.

I'd never seen one of these kinds of kites actually fly, the design looked pretty dumb to me, nothing like an airplane. The only person who actually got one of these things to stay in the air, I thought, was Benjamin Franklin in the "Max the 2000 Year Old Mouse" cartoon. I learned a lot from that mouse.

The classroom was pretty chaotic, with thirty kids spreading paper, glue and string everywhere. No one noticed me, sitting on the linoleum at the back of the class, using tape, a garbage bag and one of the provided sticks to make my kite. I used the stick as a spool for my string and used three bamboo gardening stakes for the skeleton of my black-plastic delta wing. The stakes were long, thin and flexible - the three of them weighed less than any one of the pieces of wood the teacher had handed out. There was a pile of them sitting next to the hamster cage at the back of the class. I think we used them in a tomato-planting project later that spring.

When it came time to go out and fly our newly minted kites, there was much rushing and screaming but little flying. The schoolyard was full of kids trying to get their heavy, delicate, increasingly moisture-laden creations into the air. Except for little eight-year-old me. My delta flier was at the length of my allotted string and wanting to go higher. Other kids saw this and soon everybody was giving me their string. They didn't need it. By now most of them were only using it to drag their tattered crucifixes through the wet grass.

This was one of the few moments that I can remember where I became a positive focal point. "Why was my kite black, how did it get so high and would I like their string?"

So, the result of this was that I was called to the office (after Mr. Smith, the regular class teacher took my kite away).

Mr. Smith was there, Mr. Eddie was there, and the Principal was there. I was in trouble.

Did I realize how bad I made the other kids feel because my kite flew and theirs didn't? Why were the other 39 kids able to follow Mr. Eddies' instructions? Why was I the only one who saw fit to cut up school property? I was told that this was exactly the sort of classroom disruption that had precipitated my removal form regular classroom activities in the first place.

So, without returning to my desk in regular class, I walked silently down the hall with Mr. Eddie, my special-ed teacher and back to the special-ed class. Mr. Eddie, the 70's hippie, proceeded to plant me in a study carol and lectured me at length on how inconsiderate of other peoples feelings I was.

March 19^th

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I present to you the most absolute bad-ass animals on the planet: Water Bears.

March 14^th

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"Those Water Bears look kind of like pigs. Well... pigs with claws. And they can survive outer space, eh?
....does that make them Pigs In Space! ? "

- Summerwolf

Lost Camera Found

(Allegedly a follow-up to this supposed post)

Some of you may have read my alleged rant concerning a woman who lost her camera in Hawaii. Seems that the Toronto family who found Judith's expensive little piece of digital technology were good enough to see that they got in contact with its rightful owner, but not good enough to actually return it.

Well, it seems that their hearts have grown to ten times their original size and they finally gave the girl back her camera.

Personally, I find it crass to think that facing the likelihood that they'd never be allowed back into the States again had anything to do with it.

March 14^th

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Search for the Lesser Truth

(Sort of a follow-up to A Martian Came From Lubbock)

So, T-Bone Burnett played drums on The Legendary Stardust Cowboy's only successful track. The song, and here I use the term lightly, was called "Paralyzed!". Really quite apropos.

T-Bone went on to do many other things in the music industry. He was the musical director of "O' Brother where Art Thou" and "Walk the Line: The Johnny Cash Story". "Walk the Line" was nominated for an Oscar up against a cowboy movie. It was a different sort of cowboy movie; it dealt with cowboys in the 1960's.

The Stardust Cowboy's magnum opus was released in 1968, the same year that the cartoon character "Ziggy" made his first appearance. It was in an anthology of humourous drawings put together by the American Greetings Corporation.

The '60's saw the rise of The Legendary Stardust Cowboy and his particular brand of Psychobilly music. He recorded on the same lable as David Bowie and even went so far as to cover a couple of his songs. Although, truth be told, it might be artistically confining to refer to any of The Stardust Cowboy's works as "songs". Johnny Cash walked the line, David Bowie blurred it, and I think the Stardust Cowboy may have snorted it.

Bowie was the Thin White Duke, Mr. Cash was The Man in black and The Cowboy liked to be called "The Ledge". Don't ask me why.

Bowie and The Stardust Cowboy were both born in the same year. 1947. It was the year that history finds the first mention of "Men in Black". A sailor by the name of Harold Dahl was visited by them shortly after reporting his sighting of six flying saucers over Puget Sound.

The term "Flying Saucer" had just been coined that year, and already it was in wide use. Saucers were being blamed for many things. Like the disappearance in August 1947 of the British South American Airways airliner Star Dust. The aircraft disappeared after calling into the tower that they were four minutes out and coming home.

Of course, it wasn't UFO's, it was what they call a Controlled Flight into Terrain situation. That's when an otherwise perfectly good aircraft flies into the ground. They didn't know this right away, it took 50 years for someone to stumble across the wreckage at the foot of Andean glacier. Same thing happened in 1972, the year "The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars" was released. A flight coming into Miami just flew into the everglades for no obvious reason. Both are examples of airworthy craft with apparently alert crews flying almost level into the ground. It is also referred to as the Rock-Filled Cloud Effect.

Later that year, Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier and Walter Morrison invented the modern frisbee.

The Legendary Stardust Cowboy has a real name too. Most Rock Stars do. He was Norman Carl Odam before he was Legendary, just as David Bowie was Davey Jones before he became all the people that he is today. Bowie had to change his name because a musician already had a union card under that name. I don't think the Legendary Stardust Cowboy changed his name for any of the same reasons, I just wanted to make mention of a Monkee.

A crash at Roswell New Mexico killed six monkeys that year, 1947, or some folks say. Rhesus monkeys in high-altitude suits. A barrel of them had been suspended beneath a Mogul balloon and sent into the stratosphere. For a while, they floated in their tin can, far above the world, but then a circuit went dead, something went wrong.

And the rest, as they say, is history.

March 13^th

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PSA

My brother went to the Sony store to look at plasma TV's. When I say look, I mean look. At present prices, us plebeians can only afford to stand next to one for a while.

The thing is, I don't mind not being able to buy one, in fact I'm glad that most people can't afford to either.

When prodded, the sales guy told my brother that you couldn't get a warrantee on plasma set past two years. "Two years," my brother asked, "why only two years?"

Well, nobody knows what happens after two years; plasma screen televisions haven't been around long enough for one to be left on for any real extent. So, when you buy one, you're essentially buying an experimental model.

Sales people will also readily admit that the plasma begins to degrade from the very moment that it gets integrated into the screen. You should enjoy that first day with your new TV, because it will never look that good again. What's more, there's no way to "recharge" the plasma. Once the very last bit of contrast fades from your screen that's it. I wonder how long that takes?

That's not the worst of it, not by far. Plasma displays are environmentally unconscionable on a scale unknown until now.

Every plasma display television contains up to a cubic decimeter of plasma. That's where the expense comes in. With the Space Shuttle fleet all-but-grounded, there are no more missions to gather plasma from the Van Allen Belt. Until they can develop an automated plasma collection-and-recovery system, manufacturers have to depend on manned missions for their coveted material. Plasma's negligible weight made it a quick cash cow for NASA and the consumer electronics industry was more than happy to pay. They would just pass the cost on to the consumer.

Now, without the shuttle fleet doing much flying, manufacturers have to get by on their own reserves and whatever NASA is willing to sell from it's own stocks. This pushes the plasma market higher again, and TV's cost more. Action; reaction.

The Russian Space Agency still brings down a few cubic meters of the stuff every few months, but it's nothing compared to a whole shuttle cargo-bay full. Still, it does help to shore-up the economics of their flagging space programme.

The dirtiest thing is - the thing no one in either industry likes to talk about - is the depletion of Earth's plasma. Each time a shuttle closes its doors on another shipment, they are plundering a non-renewable resource. The plasma doesn't "grow back" - when it's used up, it's gone.

Putting aside the lucid point that nifty televisions are not worth the human cost of gathering plasma from the most deadly environment known, it is also a question of planetary heritage. Even as some watch their "not guaranteed past two years" "experimental TV's" fade, we will all look on as an aspect of our planetary heritage dies away as well.

With less and less plasma in orbit around the earth, there will be fewer and fewer northern and southern lights. The same sort of electromagnetic forces that excite the plasma in a sixty thousand dollar TV excite the natural plasma in our heavens to produce the auroras. And this it does for all of us, for free.

Eventually, if plasma screen TV's and computer monitors don't turn out to be a passing fad, we will be left trying to explain to our grandchildren what the term "northern lights" means. The words will be in our books, our films, and in our minds, but the lights will have no longer be in the sky.

Still, they are really nice TV's.

March 7^th

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A Martian Came From Lubbock

The Legendary Stardust Cowboy came from Lubbock Texas. You might recognize the name because Buddy Holly was from there too. He was a psychobilly, or so they say.

A psychobilly was a variety of person who existed in Texas in the 1960's. Maybe they still exist, I'm not quite sure.

I never am.

Buddy Holly was gone by then, but I'm sure he would have approved.

The Legendary Stardust Cowboy was originally a guy called Carl. He liked the guitar and he liked screaming incoherently.

He was also pure cowboy.

He was born the year of the Roswell crash. Oddly enough, David Bowie was born that year too.

T-Bone Burnett played drums on the only song that ever gained The Stardust Cowboy any fame. The song was called "Paralyzed". It featured an awful lot of grunting, groaning, whoops and howls, along with The Cowboy's slammin' six-string acoustic.

In "The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars" David Bowie told the tale of an alien who came to Earth to rescue us from our own banality.

I think he may have landed in Texas.

March 6^th

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This has been around the datasphere for a while now, but I haven't checked it out until today. It's a photosite dealing with shots of toys as existing in full-sized reality. Most links said "neat pictures of toy cars", but I think there's more here than that. The toys are quite nifty and the work put into lining up the "illusions" (so as to suggest fully realized versions of that which they are both sign and signifier) is impressive in its own way. But what I find cool is all the pictures of left hands.

March 4^th

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Nevada National Guard Sgt. Patrick Stewart died when his CH-47 Chinook was shot down in Afghanistan. The place for his name on the memorial wall at the Northern Nevada Veterans Memorial Cemetery remains blank because the U.S. government doesn't recognize his peoples' religion.

America, big on freedom.

March 4^th

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Fire Good, Cold Bad

March 1^st

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Girl busted for wearing headphones on a city bus.

My head hurts.

March 1^st

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Email: mark@magpiedesign.net

I'm always glad to hear from you.

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Magpie Design offers a wide variety out-of-the-ordinary photographic prints and posters as well as impressionistic fine art and irreverent apparel (oddly funny t shirts).
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