Guess what.

What?

Chicken butt.

O'er A Shalbaster Tyde..

Language fails. Language will always fail. Even if you both were born at the exact same time, exact same place, you will diverge at some point and language fails where the braid of causality unravels into the chaos of the future. Capitalism, after all, is predicated entirely on exploiting the tenuous energy expended at the task of reconciling the failure of language, the inherent limitations on finite symbologies, from one consciousness to the next. But we keep trying, because we have to live. I throw a scrap of meat to the cat, and the cat eats it and appears to trust me for a little bit longer, and Foucalt gives a speech which is very beautiful to my limited grasp of language... but ultimately, language fails. Conflicting ontologies defeat our attempts at a comprehensive lexicon. These very words on this very page constitute cicatrices unhealed by any genetic contigency plan, gulfs too deep to cross, insults too scandalous to forgive. Language will always fail, and if you take into account the million inhabited planets, with their different races, the billion different universes spewing chaos into the void... well you have no choice but to throw up your hands and sigh and accept that none of us can ever, truly, agree on anything. We call this consciousness. We call this: thinking...

Aaaarrgh, a pyrate be I...

Meet Baby Alex

Button gave birth to a litter of 4 kittens last week. If there were more than 4 at any point, then there must be a horrible surprise hidden somewhere behind the shed.
This little guy was the first born, he wandered away from his mama just minutes after being born, slipped under the fence, and fell down into a deep crack in the pavement between the alley way and the fence. I could hear him meeping, but I couldn't find him right away. When I did find him, he was wedged face down in a crevice full of dead weeds and broken glass. I reached in and plucked him out, and now he is thriving.

Initially, I wasn't sure if it was o.k. to name him Alex... but yesterday, I did, and no sooner did I say so than he yawned, rolled onto his back and kicked his little legs in the air, revealing a pair of ENORMOUS TESTICLES. Way to live up to your namesake, baby Alex.

Tiny Anthem

The research field of Pataphysical Medical Technology can best be described as seeking out unscientific applications of scientific methodology. Put in a more lemniscular fashion: pataphysical medical technology and it's ancillary disciplines seek to invert the old axiom of beating swords into ploughshares, instead trying to beat ploughshares into a collection of tiny souvenier spoons that convincingly tell the story of a vacation that was never taken to a series of tourist destinations that never existed.

Laboratory notes on the Process of Laudanal Mafipulation:

Let's get something straight... I am not actively trying to kill myself. That would be foolish. I am merely trying to attenuate some of my more valetudinarian tendencies.

Where are you going, when are you coming home?

"Super Dimension Century Orguss" was an anime created by japanese animation company "Big West" in 1983. It was not an actual sequel to "Macross", but it reunited the same creative team in the hopes of creating another big hit. Sadly, it was just too different from Macross and any other SF anime, for that matter, and it was not very successful in japan. In the states, it is remembered only for the huge pile of Orguss toy and model merchandise that made it to american toystores... and that is quite a pity, because it was such a unique, quirky, and charming show. Not quite as brainy as "Hitchhiker's Guide", not quite as slapstick as "Futurama", but certainly in that same vein of bizzarre, mutiverse-hopping adventures and ontological puzzles.

The simplest explanation I can offer of ORGUSS's very un-simple plot goes as follows: on the eve of world war 3, cocky mech pilot Kei Katsuragi tries to detonate an experimental "dimensional bomb" to break a bitter stalemate on the battlefield. The untested bomb malfunctions, creating a bizarre aggregate of 100 different alternate realities all crammed onto the same earth, which is imprisoned inside of an impenetrable forcefield that traps heat and greenhouse gases along with it's various denizens. Kei joins up with crew of the Glomar (see picture above), a hovering land battleship inhabited by the Emaan, a very humanoid race from an alternate reality in which humanity got their act just a little bit more together. The libertarian society of the matriarchal Emaan becomes explored in depth during the show's run, their nomadic lifestyle, their compulsive drive to turn a profit in trading technology with alien races, and their oddly utopian sexual behaviour (all emaanian tribes/clans are expected to sleep in one big collective bedroom, with adjacent "privacy" rooms reserved for sexual trysts).

So this weird patchwork world is extremely unstable, given "dimensional storms" where large areas can suddenly shift from the distant past to the future. Along the way, the crew of Glomar (again, see above picture) encounter dragon's, dalek-esque robot empires, future nazis, barbarians, carnivorous plants, giant vampire bats, and all other manner of strange creatures and antagonists from earth's possible futures and pasts. Just awesome, completely awesome.

Like I said, it really is a shame that more people didn't watch this show. Giant robot shows, and sadly, anime in general, have fallen into a system of cliches and tropes that are still repeated today (the reluctant pacifist hero who doesn't want to fight has been done over and over since Gundam), but Orguss has no time for such cliches... it's too busy playing weird games with shifting settings and timelines, and sneaking in an obsession with Lewis Carrol under the surface.

Virtually all of the show's very unique robots showed up as model kits and AMAZING toys by the innovative (and much lamented) Takatoku toy company, but as far as I can tell, there never were any models of the Glomar, not even fan-produced or scratchbuilt. If you can find one, you are looking harder than me. So I built the one you see above, a big heavy doorstop type thing made out of sculpey.

It is also worth mentioning that the interior of the Glomar has a weird Jules Verne thing going on; lots of ornamental brass and mahogany. And the ship seems to be constantly floating across a pink sunset, with the characters chatting lazily on the deck, cheerfully discussing the possibility that they, and the earth itself, are most likely doomed.