some words to not

admit it: "time" is the true god of relationships. it stands right there in bed with you and asserts its presence separating the first week of lovemaking from the second year of sleeping together. time, god, will make you break up from a partner that was perfect for you two years ago, even if the person hasn't changed. time has passed, and it will not leave without its due sacrifice. time brings you closer together and equally tears you apart. it leads your love life, but also crushes your relationships like flies.

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blogging live from john zorn's talk at the mit media lab. here's some quotes:

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so what becomes of you, my love
when they have finally stripped you of
the handbags and the gladrags
that your poor old granddad had to sweat to buy you?

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my column was up yesterday. i didn't have time to post it yet, as well as comment on the strange timing of its publication. this is a busy week for me, so i'll hope to get back to this a bit later.

i came across the walla syndication of this column.

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added "l.a. confidential" to the film list. a very smooth gangster flick. nothing too pretentious, and the many characters on the set all have honest and credulous dilemmas. i've been told to watch this movie for years, and now i finally have. not on my top ten list, but definitely a fine way to spend two hours outside your own head.

as long as i was at it, also added "wonder boys" by the same director, curtis hanson.

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We grow neither better or worse as we get old, but more like ourselves.

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well, well. who woulda thought, but this summer we will see yet another identical science fiction movie with all the same identical scenes and puns and computer graphics. and there's even a quaint mama-kid relationship with sexy hardcore action hero will smith.

just in case you want to see the by now standard 7-minute all-giveaway trailer, in which you will see absolutely every last interesting shot from the movie, be my guest.

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new column is up, named "the robots' short journey in the desert".

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so, earlier tonight our robot, leo, broke a link pin between his neck motor and his actual neck shaft. so we called in our very own dan stiehl who knows how to fix that sort of stuff, and he looked at leo's motors and joints while asking us what leo was doing exactly when it happend.

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but less than 4 and a half hours laters, at 10:57 pacific time, the ride died prematurely in a low sputter of choking motors. the million in cash remained in the pentagon and no participating rover got to visit sin city, they weren't even close. instead a row of steel corpses lined the route from the starting point and some 7.5 miles into the desert. at the far end of which laid the red "humvee" built at carnegie mellon, an institute once named as "having the highest robot-to-human ratio in the states".

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How can our young people drink in through their eyes a continuous spectacle of intense and strained activity and feeling without harmful effects? Parents and teachers will do well to guard the young against overindulgence in the taste for the "movie".

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walking home from lab today (admittedly in a melancholy mood), i noticed a saddening fact.

during almost two years of living in the united states, and knowing little about this country before i got here, i kept being surprised, amazed and shocked about various aspects of the culture here at the "hub of the empire". ever so often i would shake my head or rub my eyes in disbelief that such a place really exists.

but tonight, walking in the dark, when i tried to think about the ten biggest oddities of this place, what i came up with was pretty much a list of the most clicheed statements about america one can think of. it felt pretty useless realizing that my wildest emotional revelations, upon inspection, are nothing more than just the stereotypes i already had before moving.

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you can now filter the blog by category. the list of the current categories is on the right, and you can also directly link to index.php?cat=whatever .

and as long as we have the mic on, note the new rss feed and the oh-so-open source blog php code that you can download just below the picture of that handsome bloke on the right. the code is experimental, unedited and come with no warranty, so it might not be suited for young children.

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"the world doesn't run on money. the grass doesn't pay the clouds for rain." - buckminster fuller

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this week's column is up early this week. well, i sent it in early, too. so no surprise here. just comes to show how you can shape the world around you. no syndication this time, but a front page link on the haaretz website, which is always nice. you can also read the local version here on your very own "some words to not".

seriously, though, my column was posted just below the headline on haaretz this morning, which read: "hammas and islamic jihad vow revenge after 14 palestinians were killed in idf operations in gaza last night". makes me feel a little stupid to write about micro-payments. i wish there was something more meaningful i could do about this whole mess.

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the 10th anniversary of two seminal events are near this date; one just passed, one is imminent. i thought this would be a good opportunity to remember that the first palestinian suicide bombing in israel (a hammas bus attack in afula) happened on april 6th, 1994 following the february 25th, 1994 massacre of 29 praying palestinians in hebron at the hands of baruch goldstein.

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this just up. didn't want to spend too much time on style, so it's very simple now. i'll work on it a bit later on.

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still reading donella h. meadows's "the global citizen".

in one of her chapters she cites paul gruchow's book "the necessity of empty places" (1988), in which he speaks of wilderness and empty places. i feel that this quote is more than just an interesting view on an old concept. it seems to capture something more profound.

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greg pak, director of "robot stories", has linked to my blog on his blog. in his entry he writes beautifully about how i thoughtfully wrote about how people writing blogs promote his movie.

i just couldn't resist the infinite mirror effect.

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new column is up, also on walla. hebrew title says "like the present, only more sophisticated". it sounds better in hebrew.

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