Three paintings sold

These three images were done way back in 2002, and only translated into oil on canvas this year. They were part of a show Kenn and I are having at a Kappeh, a restaurant/gallery in Guadalajara. We’re showing 20 paintings and I have to admit, these three are the last ones I expected to evoke a response, but the buyer wanted all three as a set and that was that.

It’s always been my dream to sell oil paintings of personal work, but I’d kind of forgotten about it for the last five or six years – not because I’d given up on it, but because I was so happy doing magazine illustration that the idea of selling paintings just never crossed my mind that much. But reaction to our work has been incredibly positive, so I’m hoping that this will start to become a bigger part of our careers in the future.

Race to the top!

Last year I came across a newspaper article that predicted Mexico would overtake the US as the fattest nation on earth sometime in 2008. Which surprised me, because previously, I’d read that the U.K was already the fattest nation on earth, per capita. So with 2008 pretty much over except for the tiresome top ten lists on Digg, I Google “fattest nation on earth” and come up with…Australia? Really?

Well, no, we discover that Australia is only, disappointingly, on track to become the fattest nation on earth. So don’t give up Mexico, there’s still a chance!

Mexico’s status as a potential front-runner is no mystery to me. Sugar is practically an airborne pollutant. Then there’s a traditional diet heavy on corn, fried meats and melted Manchego cheese, an addiction to Mayonnaise, salt and rich sauces and a rapid, as in first-ten-seconds-of-the-universe-rapid expansion of the middle class with a corresponding demand for fast food.

I mean, they put cream cheese and mayo in sushi here. Sushi! Sorry, but just because I live here now doesn’t mean I have to embrace everything. I’m not required to load up the back of a pickup truck with schoolchildren and drive on the freeway, either. No, I’m not making that up. I’ve seen it with my own eyes, and if you want to know what white-knuckled stress is, try being stuck behind one of those trucks in a cab in rush hour.

But you can eat incredibly well here if you want to – and inexpensively too. The cuisine in Mexico is world-class and it’s a hell of an improvement on ubiquitous, overpriced Asian/Fusion served on postmoderny square plates that dominates the Pacific Northwest now. But if you ever find yourself in a hurry to put on weight, come down for a couple of weeks and I’ll show you how to do it the easy way.

Smug Stepford Moms throw Poverty Pity Party – all by Computer!

or, The Infuriating New Face of Poverty

Via Althouse

The end of the superstates

One possible outcome of the financial crisis is that we might see the end of the giant trading blocs and superstates that have defined the last 150 years or so of political and economic history. We’ve always been under the impression that a unified global government is inevitable, as superstates and trading blocs grow and merge with each other. But historically, giant states tend to want to break up into culturally-defined regional economies. Part of the reason for that is our nature as primates – there are limits to what we can mentally identify as “community”. We’re not wired to think of distant nations as part of the village and while a global village might sound lovely and be a social engineer’s wet dream, it’s not something that we’ll ever really care about in our hearts. And societies that people don’t care about tend to disintegrate.

Are geographical superstates like Canada and the U.S. doomed to break up though? Who knows? If they did, it would be more a matter of natural economic and cultural restructuring. British Columbia has more in common culturally and economically with the Western United States and the Pacific Rim than it does with eastern Canada. Eventually that affinity has to manifest itself in some kind of political re-orientation. There’s just no way around it. Whether or not that means “the end of Canada” as a political entity is impossible to say.

And if anything is going to make America break up, it’s as likely to be cultural divisions as economic stress. It’s pretty clear that Joe the Plumber and Sarah Palin are just never going to be able or willing to reconcile themselves to 21st century America – and 21st century America doesn’t even want them. There are two Americas that simply don’t want anything to do with each other and who are growing more polarized and hardened every day. That has to manifest itself in some kind of political re-organization. I don’t see how it can’t.

From the point of view of future historians, that re-orientation may look like some catastrophic upheaval. But it may not even be something that you and I really notice on a day to day basis. It may be mostly seamless, with punctuated moments of crisis and turbulence in the  background of daily living. Kind of like what we’re experiencing right now.

“It’s going to be as bad as the last thing we survived!”

They’re running out of crises to compare this to. It may even be as bad as the recession of the 90s. Which I don’t even remember, and didn’t even really notice. I was living in Montreal which was going through it’s own downturn, as Quebec learned that there’s a price to pay for decades of scary inflammatory facsist rhetoric. Oops, did I say that out loud?

Maybe the current economic crisis will be as bad as the one in the 80s. Or possibly the 70s. Or the recession of early 2000. Maybe it could even be as bad as the Great Depression. Or the Long Depression that started in 1876 and lasted… well, a long time. Or Europe in the 50s, or Asia in the 60’s. Or Germany in the 20s and 30’s.

Is it just me or is there a pattern starting to emerge here? Why, it almost seems that you could view the last 100+ years as a history of uninterrupted catastrophe if you wanted to. This time is different of course, because it’s global. So it’s not happening over there. And of course, global problems require global solutions, which is code for consigning our fates to the whims and wisdom of an unelected and unaccountable global bureaucracy empowered by a global tax. Or maybe a resurgence of nationalist protectionism and a breakup of superstates into regional economies.

Too early to tell, because this is just getting started. At the  end though, we’ll survive and we’ll come out the end of this stronger, with sounder economies based on real production and real trade. There may or may not be a Canada and a United States or a European Union and United Kingdom, at least not as we know them today. In really tough times, people tend to be  less interested in supporting the nation or the province or the state six doors over. But we (as in Western civilization, which is bigger than any one nation or currency or trading bloc) wll survive. I have no doubt in my mind about that at all.

“We have to go back to a sane economy, where we save our money and actually make stuff”

Sounds like good advice to me. I’ve said it before, but it’s worth saying again: this crisis is not a “failure of Capitalism”. Actually making stuff, trading it and saving money is Capitalism. Entire nations living off credit and borrowing against things that other nations make on the promise that you’ll probably buy them and maybe even pay for them someday – that’s not Capitalism. We don’t even really have a word for it yet. People just call it Capitalism out of  habit – because Americans are Capitalists, right? And they make noises about the collapse of Capitalism because…that’s just what you’re supposed to say about Capitalism, isn’t it? But the reality is, the United States, Canada, Britain, et al are not Capitalist societies, and haven’t been for a long while now.

There’s still over a month left!!!

According to supplement-gobbling crank Ray Kurzweil, by 2009 we’re supposed to be wearing our computers and all data input is supposed to be done via voice. I have to admit the computers-as-clothing  prediction never flew with me. Do you hand wash a t-shirt with integrated nano-circuitry woven into the fabric or is it better to dry clean? And why would you want an iPhone integrated into your clothing when you can just carry it in your pocket? Is that such an inconvenience?

As for voice input, that’s one of those things that we could have, technically, but that no one actually wants, like video phones or internet refrigerators. People still use keyboards for a variety of reasons not least of which is the fact that they’re relatively quiet – and writing is a completely seperate process from speaking that involves different centers of the brain. It’s actually much more efficient for me to type even something as simple as a blog entry than it would be for me to dictate it to a voice-recognition application. How irritating would the modern office be if we were all sitting around dictating memos and corporate finance reports into our shirt sleeves?

And why 2009? What was it that made Kurzweil decide we’d have technology X by such a specific date? Or that anyone would even want it if we had it? And if hís timeline to immortality and mind uploads is already off, what does that portend for his assertion that the singularity will happen no later than 2029?

Unfortunately, Kurzweil’s insistence that the singularity and practical immortality would be achieved in his own lifetime is based on his own overwhelming fear of death. Then he’s just gone and plugged in arbitrary milestones along the way to make it all seem achievable by the desired due date. It’s not  that I doubt we’ll have some or even most  of the technologies that Kurzweill predicts, but scientific and technological progress are not required to follow a timeline that can save him from personal oblivion.

Monster!

Allright, one this one ocassion I’m going to say that attacking Sarah Palin as cruel and insensitive because she’s being interviewed while Turkeys are being killed in the background is just silly. Are there people out there who are so insulated from reality that they’re able to pretend the same scenes aren’t involved in every burger and chicken breast that they eat? And if some of the people complaining are vegetarians, then what exactly are you complaining about? That Sarah Palin isn’t a vegan? Aren’t there more relevant issues to attack her over?

A teenager kills himself live on the internet

and his audience – some of them anyway – goad him on in comments. Is this the start of a new and disturbing trend? Or is it no different than people in a crowd of onlookers shouting “Jump!”to a suicide poised on a window ledge? Does the fact that it happened online make it different, uglier, something new? Maybe the fact that it happened online makes it seem more disturbingly clinical and impersonal somehow. And is this the first time someone has killed themselves online? Probably not. There are plenty of suicide clubs online.

I don’t see how the internet adds any new dimension of creepiness to this tragedy. It’s exactly as horrible and sad as if he’d overdosed in a playground with his classmates egging him on. We’re just so used to the idea that the internet magnifies horror, makes it – and us – qualitatively different somehow, that we automatically feel we need to find new explanations and impose some novel, broader social theory to explain these sorts of events.

My whole life summed up in a headline

Being a solo gamer in a multiplayer world

“The best writers are creating TV series. It’s all in TV”

So sayeth Hollywood writing guru Robert McKee. After renting the infantile fanboy wankfest The Incredible Hulk the other night, it’d be hard to disagree. On the other hand, how many times have we had to listen to these predictions of Hollywood’s imminent decline and fall? About as often as we hear about the “End of the American Empire”. And surely McKee doesn’t mean to say that all television writing is superior to anything that Hollywood can produce. Or does he?

And what do we even mean when we say Hollywood now? Isn’t that like saying “Wall Street” when we’re really talking about a global trading network that includes London, Tokyo, Signapore and 100 other financial centres?

What Liberalism isn’t – at least for me.

One of the critiques of liberalism is that it goes hand in hand with a weird obsessive culture of bureaucratic planning fetishism. Liberals, so the stereotype goes, don’t like free markets and free trade because freedom is inherently disorderly, chaotic, given to zany unpredictable mood swings. Why not have a planned economy? You can’t just have an auto industry that produces cars willy-nilly. That’s crazy. Why not set production quotas, and guidelines on what type of cars should be produced? You can’t just put some grass and trees down and call it a park. You need to get a designer in there and create a public space. There needs to be art, maybe a couple of nice scultpures. And a few memorials. They should both respect the sensibilities of the community, yet challenge preconcieved values at the same time. Everything goes better with planning! Of course, you need some muscle behind you to make sure your planning sticks, so planning and state authority make natural bedfellows.

It’s hard to argue against that stereotype, except to simply say that it is a stereotype. To me, that’s not liberalism. That’s statism. Not the same thing at all. For me, capital L Liberalism means you have an empty lot, you put down some grass and plant a few trees and then you leave it alone and let the community make of it what it will. If they fuck it up and let it turn into an open air junkie hostel, well, too bad. For me, Liberalism means you leave the auto industry alone and let them make whatever cars they feel like making. If they end up making gas-guzzling SUVs because they’re just plain stupid and don’t know how to do anything else, well too bad. Liberalism for me doesn’t mean you micromanage society and culture and it doesn’t mean you subsidize uncompetitive and lazy business practices.

The worst drink in America

It packs a whopping 2310 calories, 66 teaspoonfuls of sugar and 108 grams of fat. It would take 240 minutes on a treadmill to burn it off. And it’s called a health drink.

The ungrateful bastards haven’t been listening

There’s another level of significance to an Obama win that still hasn’t penetrated the bubble universe of the right wing commentariat yet. Obama’s win wasn’t just a rejection of McPalin and the GOP. It was a personal rejection by the American public of Mark Steyn, Peggy Noonan, Michelle Malkin, Glenn Reynolds, Sean Hannity, Ann Coulter and the rest of the blathering idiots who for the last 8 years have been screaming from their pulpits that they are the true voice of the American people. I hate to break it to you guys, but you’ve been fired. Why are you stilll hanging around the office?

MANHUNT!

Tomorrow the Countess of Crass finalizes her divorce from homophobic hubby Guy Ritchie, and the  hunt begins anew for another man – but whose?

Another great little app

The state of things

We’ve come a long way from when I enrolled in my first university level astrophysics course. In those days, questions like “What came before the big bang?” and “What’s outside our universe” were scorned as Meaningless Questions. Any fool knew that the universe arose from nothing, that time began with the Big Bang and that there was no such thing as “outside”. Our picture of the universe was considered complete in every major detail.

Today we have a general consensus that we live in a universe of 11 dimensions that resides in an inconceivably vast multiverse that is possibly infinitely older than our own. With the help of the Large Hadron Collider, we may at least be able to deduce something about conditions prior to the inflationary event that created the cosmos we know. So much for meaningless questions.

But then there’s dark matter and dark energy, which together make up about 96% of the universe. We still have absolutely no idea what they are, or if they even exist. They’re just terms physicists made up as placeholders for phenomenon we don’t understand, like the fact that the expansion of the universe is unaccountably accelerating and the fact that galaxies don’t appear to have enough nearly enough mass to hold themselves together.

We still have no experimental evidence that string theory is valid, although it makes things work better than any other set of ideas. We have absolutely no idea why the critical constants of physics have the values they have, or even if they are in fact constants at all. It looks as though the values of gravity and the speed of light might have been slightly different in the past, which is…impossible. Even the theory of universal gravitation, now 400 years old, may need some serious tweaking. Gravity may not work in exactly the same way over cosmic distances as it does at solar-system scales. The fact is, we just don’t know.

So more is unknown about the universe today than was believed to be unknown when I was in class. That’s actually a much better place for physics to be, because there are no more “meaningless” questions – just unanswered ones. Either that means we’ve come to the end of physics as an experimental science, or we’re on the verge of a revolution that will completely transform our understanding of reality. I vote for the latter.

Can’t wait

Lies!

Sometimes I wonder where they get this weather info from. I’m sitting out on the patio right now and I promise you, it’s warmer than 16 degrees and there isn’t a cloud in the sky. Not so much as a wisp.

I love eReader

Like I mentioned yesterday I first came across eReader in 1999 when I got my first Palm Pilot and discovered eBooks. There are a few ebook apps available – Stanza is another very good one, but I’m totally loyal to eReader. For starters, their selection is diverse, easy to browse and prices are exactly in the range that you’d want ebooks to be.The eReader app is also a little more robust than some other book readers like Stanza. It’s also easy to browse their store, purchase and download directly through my iPod, so I can have a new book ready to read in less than a minute if I want.

The thing that really impressed me about eReader though is that when I installed their app on my iPod, I instantly had access to every book I’ve ever purchased through them, all the way back to ‘99. There was no funny business like “Oh, you bought that book for your Palm Pilot, so you’ll have to buy it again for your iPod”. My entire library was acessible to me. In a world of media dominated  by platform and device-specific liscencing, I really appreciate that.