Drained of all Cartography

I had a dream some time ago.
I was standing on the crest of a mountain on Guadalcanal.

I've never been to Guadalcanal, but I woke up with a very strange confidence in the geographical and topographical layout of the small island.

In my dream, the island was shaped like an S that had been pushed off balance towards the West and a photograph-map had been taken just before it hit the imaginary ground horizon. I was convinced that most of the southern half of the Island was comprised of mountain ranges, the tallest of which occurred a little West of center in the chain. This is the mountain my dream took place on.

I woke up very certain that my topographical knowledge of this island could not be correct.

But recently I decided to check.


















Horrifying.

I tried to remember where and when I would have been exposed to the geographical and topographical information that I rehashed in dreaming.

I tried to understand why I would have committed that information to memory.

I could not remember and I cannot understand. I am afraid I may have to admit that I have not yet been externally exposed to this information, but I suspect I may be living backwards in time.

It is possible that this information will be or has been instrumental to my future self.

I found out later that
the mountain's name is Mt. Makarakomburu.
It is 2447m above sea level.

I can remember nothing more from my dream.

Chinese Frustration

It should be noted, my recent drawings lack a little quality.

Sometimes this happens to me.
I get frustrated with the demanding shapes and feelings of people and their faces.

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This happens and I concentrate on more forgivingly shaped things.
Owl-trees or broken binoculars.






















I might have hyenas later.
I've wanted hyenas for some time.

Ribbon

Let's Synchronize Watches

Everything is coming up strangled.

There used to be a secret army of assassins and muggers that roamed India from about
the 17th to the 19th century. They were called Thuggee and that's where the word 'thug' comes from.

They used to befriend travelers and strangle them.
They mostly agreed it to be a divine mission. They felt that with each life they took, they delayed the coming of Kali and great destruction for one whole millennium.


A great deal has changed.
The Thuggee no longer exist and Kali has more recently been presented as an honest, benevolent, mother-goddess.

Ice -- Station -- Zebra

Ten fingers of whiskey,

ten fingers of terrible drawing?






















And the coattails of my mind are dragging through the kind of stomach ache you get from drinking a lot of warm liquid very quickly.

And any school of thought that has, as a classifying gem, such statements as:

"HELL IS -- OTHER PEOPLE."

-is not the school of thought for me.

That is a line from an existentialist play by Jean Paul Sartre.
And it's the sort of thing that keeps me from sleeping soundly at night.

Jean Paul Sartre is dead, but I brought him back to make a single change to this play.
We spoke warmly together on my green couch and it turns out, very funnily, that in French, the aforementioned line goes: "L'ENFER C'EST -- LES AUTRES."

And what he really meant was: "L'ESPOIR C'EST -- LES AUTRES."
Which would translate to HOPE IS -- OTHER PEOPLE.
Very similar words.
Very understandable mistake.
Sartre confided in me, that he felt very poorly about fighting alongside the people of Paris in the May '68 uprising, while betraying their cause with falsely conceived typos that suggested hell comes from the togetherness of people.

I even got him to sign his name.
It's all legal, if you're very concerned about that.

Anyway, I'd be really happy if the next publishing of this play included his sanctioned changes
because it was a really bad play.

Citizen Know Nothing

What a waste of a good hat.

Right about it. No doubt about it.

Adhesive Solution

I felt a little bad about the last post.
It's Sunday morning and it's a beautiful day.

Life is not about dying.

Sepulchered

There's a place just south of San Francisco called Colma.
About 1500 people reside above the ground.


About 1.5 million reside under the ground.


Newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst, frontier-outlaw Wyatt Earp, and even Joe DiMaggio, the baseball player.

They're all together.
And they're all dead.


“I am dying. Please — bring me a toothpick.”
-Alfred Jarry, 1907.

Firing Blanks

Terracotta plot

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The pipes, the pipes are calling.

Yesterday, I woke up and couldn't get Derry air/Danny boy out of my head.

Oyster Knife

When pried open -

It let loose two pieces of uncooked rotini and an American quarter minted in 1977.

Blind Muezzin

The blind muezzin turned and yelled:

"Warmer temperatures!

Warmer colours!

Warmer feelings!

Warmer Dreams!"


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Safe mechanism

All the rage

I forgot to mention that this special sort of navy painting had a name.

It was called Dazzle paint, or Razzle Dazzle.
I find these names to be incredibly embarrassing so I'll never use them again.

People not only liked seeing this sort of paint in the water.
But on people and automobiles as well.

Bulwark

A person who adds camouflage to things is called a camoufleur.

When pressed into the difficult work of camouflaging sea-going vessels during the First World War, they all decided not to.

The British camofleurs really enjoyed Cubist painting.
They liked looking at the lines and feeling confused.

For the duration of the first world war, naval camofleurs gave up the ghost.
They came to terms with the fact that nobody can hide corvettes.

They rallied behind the Cubist standard, vowed to further its confusing nature into the frothy oceans!

In covering these hideous gunboats in wildly attractive patterns, they hoped it would prove very difficult for enemy range finders to get an accurate bearing on the distance, heading, and speed of these vessels because of their mass being all broken up by odd colour fields, false bows and complex line art.

There are plenty of black and white images out there.

The colours have been digitally suggested in this photograph.

Best part : There's really no evidence to suggest the paint schemes were very effective.

Make it Snappy

Make it sing

Ironspike

Crush, once a city in Texas, was manufactured for a single spectacle.
On September 15th, 1896, 40 000 people converged in Crush.

This made Crush the second most populous city in the state for a single day.

The crowds arrived to see two steam locomotives collide in a planned accident.

At 5:00 pm, engine 999 (painted green) and engine 1001 (painted red) along with their respective boxcars, were sent full steam towards each other.

The trains both reached speeds of about 40mph.



and when they collided, their boilers exploded in unison.
It sent pieces of train everywhere.














Everyone got a souvenir.

Le Père Ubu

Cedar tree

Humbaba

Flood Parallels

Angola Flotilla

Float McCoy, in a steam storm, once lost himself.
When he managed to levitate out of the hot mess, he ventured to find himself once again.
60 years in a cave yielded results.
He felt his salvation in the logical law of identity.
He had a pair of specially etched spectacles made to forever remind him that:

A=A.

Unfortunately, he failed to take into account the fact that, whenever wearing the spectacles he never takes off, he sees the law backwards: A=A.

And so, he wreaks havoc with his steam fleet that isn't what it is.

Tall scaffold

Few nights ago, I saw a movie in a beautiful building.
The ticket booth was a wall and a stainless steel porthole with a video screen.
On the video screen was a person manning the booth.

This was way too strange for me. I opted to use a real machine to buy my ticket.
And that was no problem.

It's funny though, there was a man there who had really serious trouble understanding the automated ticket machine dispenser, but later on, I saw him chatting with the person in the video porthole very casually.

Hungarian Hyperinflation

It is estimated that the total weight of gold people have mined over the years is around 125 000 tonnes. If it were stacked, it would reach dimensions of 18m x 36m x 9m.

This massive stack of gold though, would still be worth less than the currency currently circulating the United States alone given the price of gold above.
If things got really crazy and people decided to move back to the gold standard for stability sake or something silly, it would have to be done in conjunction with a fractional-reserve policy. That is to say: banks would have to constantly loan out far more than they kept in reserves, which is something they do already.

But in Canada that hasn't been a concern since 1991.
Canada has adopted a Zero-Reserves Banking System!



I don't even understand how that's possible.

Dead Metal

I read about money all night.
I'm very confused.

At this point, I have come to find that there are three different kinds of money.

There is commodity money.
This is something that is a commercial commodity as well as a medium of exchange.
Historically, precious metals like gold and silver has been used as commodity money in addition to things like grain and livestock. In the 1800s most Industrial nations held to a gold standard. The gold standard saw to it that all bank notes produced were backed by gold and could be exchanged at any time for the gold they represented from the issuer of the note.

So far so good.
There was a time when bank notes represented actual stockpiles of commodities.
And if you wanted commodities instead of pieces of paper, you could demand them.

Now there's fiat money.
I'm still having great difficulty accepting this.
I was always pretty sure money was a very strange concept
but I really had no idea. It seems that fiat currency really has no basis in reality. Its value is absolutely dependent on its own legality. It's a government's promise. If at any time a people's confidence supporting a legal system backing a fiat currency collapses, so too will the currency. The gold standard got too silly, it just couldn't keep up and ultimately, there just isn't enough of it aboveground to reasonably ensure a complete currency backing. The gold standard has been largely ignored by the world since 1971.

Every nation in the world currently produces fiat currency.

Arbitrarily!

The third type of money seems to make the littlest sense of all.
I wouldn't dare pretend I understand any underlying principle to it and I'd run from anyone who thought they did. From what I understand, credit money is future money. Banks create it when they're feeling optimistic and approving loans.

The most bizarre thing I have discovered is that this particular form of money has vastly overtaken both commodity money and fiat money in terms of abundance and activity in the global economy. A majority of the money we are exchanging for goods and services is credit money! Future money that does not exist yet!

Madness!


Anyway, have a nice Monday.


Colouring book

Another

Dust Cribbage

Le désespoir est assis sur un banc.

sur un banc

Undersea Fault

In 1931, Alice's adventures in Wonderland was banned in the Hunan Province of China because "Animals should not use human language."

Tin rubbish

We
Could
Recycle
The neon
waste from the
São Paulo advertisement ban
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It could be very hip

Good morning, Favela.

Like in Ancient Greece, city councilors in São Paulo took part in the sacred and confusing procedure of Ostracism earlier this year.
Much like the Ancient Greeks, Forty Six São Paulo city councilors looked around quite nervously and asked themselves in a room without cameras whether or not they should like to find something guilty among them.
The unanimous opinion was in the affirmative.
"Oh yes, something must take the fall."



Keeping to Greek tradition, the city councilors etched names into broken pottery. These names belonged to things they thought were quite deserving of blame and expulsion from society.




Tallying the votes, it was found that forty five of the forty six councilors felt that advertisements needed to be removed from their large city. (It must be noted that the forty sixth councilor was also an advertising executive.)

And so, on January first, or some other date,
Advertisements were rounded up and expelled from the city of São Paulo.

This city of 11 million people, one of the largest cities in the world, is a city without advertising.

For years, the advertisements in São Paulo not only propagated the hyperreal but physically obstructed the real. Billboards stretched across the tops of highway interchanges and advertising agencies would often offer cash settlements to poor homeowners for rights on their gardens or walls. With the advertisements gone, the rusted out structures that formerly housed them now stand as frames for the backgrounds they had masked.

The cascading favelas of São Paulo sprawl naked now!



A photographer has been taking pictures of São Paulo's
billboard graveyards. The first photograph is his.
The rest of his photos can be found here