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“How long has it been since you could hear?” The doctor stared into my ear. “A long time?”

“Years,” I said. “But this weekend it was really bad.”

And it was. I could not even hear myself urinate. My wife had her birthday party and I muddled through as I often do, nodding and guessing at what people said. It was bad but it was nothing new. Just a little more severe.

It’d piled up over the last two weeks. I lost hearing in my right ear. Then my left. Both at the same time. And it wouldn’t come back. I tried drops, hydrogen peroxide, warm water flushes, everything the Internet recommended and a few things it advised against. None of it worked.

This was nothing new. It’d never really worked. I’ve been hard of hearing for years.

Usually, I lost hearing in only one ear at a time. I often awoke more or less deaf in the ear I slept on. After a few hours of fiddling with it, I was usually able to coax some function out of it. I once spent a week, stone deaf in my right ear, feeling the entire time I like was leaning to the side and having trouble balancing.

My hearing had been degrading for a long time. Since my early twenties.

I’d not only become used to it but had altered my life to suit it. I avoided parties because I couldn’t hear what people were saying. I didn’t eat with people because I could not hear over my chewing. I was standoffish because it’s easier than death by a thousand pardons. It all happened so gradually that I accepted all this as normal.

People wrote it off as misanthropy or quirkiness. I cultivated that. It was easier.

I’d sometimes tell people I was close to: ‘I’m not actually in all that bad of a mood a lot of time, you just need to understand, I have really hard time hearing and social events are physically hard for me.’ But I always got the sense that they thought I was bullshitting them. That’s what being a good faker does for you.

So I’d generally just shut up about it. And turn up the volume. iPod always on full so I could hear it.

Sitting alone, aloof and ears full of cotton.

Shutting up about it wasn’t my problem. Not seeing a doctor was.

This weekend, it got to the point when I couldn’t hear cars and was almost hit by one. I had to announce my deafness to my wife’s friends at her birthday party so they would not think me rude if I ignored them or suddenly started speaking gibberish — replying to my mishearing of their words rather than what they said.

Once again, I found myself just getting used to it.

Left to my own devices, I wouldn’t have done a thing.

But my wife was getting sick of shouting at me. The volume I needed on our electronic media grated on her. When she came home, unexpected, when she heard the tv turned up to 58 and saw some of the stuff I’d pulled from my ears, black and tar-like and disgusting as anything you’d ever want to see come out of a loved one, she insisted I see a doctor. Marvelous how loud a spouse can be. Sometimes.

It took over a week to convince me.

“We’re going to need to soften this for three hours.” He dripped drops in my ears and shoved them deep. I shuddered and went dizzy. “Don’t take these out and come back at one.”

“Pardon?” I said.

In the end, it was a simple problem with a simple solution. It was also a disgusting one. Hard compacted earwax. If he had of told me my eardrum was ruptured, I would not have been surprised. I’ve experienced sharp and sudden pains in my ears for years. Sometimes they felt like they’d exploded. I was hoping for earwax.

They softened it with drops and flushed it out with water. They tried again. They needed another tool. A much more heavy duty one. They tried again. They needed metal tools. They yanked and pulled. They flushed and yanked and pulled again. The doctor loosened something and gasped. He actually stepped back and gasped.

“I heard that,” I said. “That didn’t sound good.”

The doctor said he’d only seen one other guy with this much wax, hard compacted to the drum before. He came in screaming. I’m not a screamer. As perverse as it is, I’m proud of my stubbornness and stupidity.

I really shouldn’t be. It’s fucking idiotic.

But when they’d finally pulled out the six toy cars, the family of earwigs and the beehive from my ears, and I could hear like I don’t ever remember hearing, I felt like the whole world was screaming at me.

PUT IT BACK! IT’S TOO LOUD.

My voice sounded like a recording of my voice. At the grocery store, I completely lost focus. It sounded like I was in a club. Everything was vibrant and close. Too close. I couldn’t focus.

“Enjoy it,” the doctor said. “The sky is blue again.”

And it was.

But I am not me.

In the street, I spoke to my wife. Waiting for her reply, I leaned in and cocked my head towards her, aiming my good ear, so I could hear. She replied. I flinched backwards. It was so loud. My body language was wrong.

I laughed and wondered if I’d lost my charm. Most of my mannerisms were caused by covering up my lack of hearing. My natural scowl was a result of trying to hear. My leaning in to listen, the same. Rather than appearing concentrated and interested, am I now going to recoil away from people, eyes wide and horrified? Fucked if I know.

But my whole body feels different.

I woke up today, thinking it was pouring rain. The kettle was on.

My world is a little less interior.

So, like I don’t know if any of this has a moral or is just a gross story that highlights how ridiculous of a person I am, but there it is and it is what it is. I’m just pretty happy that I can hear clearly out of both ears for the first time in years.

If you have a similar problem, go see your doctor, I guess.

Or not.

I’m not your momma.

Continue reading »]]> Been a week, huh?

I doubt these internetz require any more opinion or speculation about current events, whether it’s about bombs in Boston or our hyper-mediated relationship with disasters. I have a take on all this stuff and most of it is in the novel that I’ve submitted to my agent. The final pre-sales-attempt work started earlier this week. So yeah . . .

Fiction is a better form -for me- than blogging.

Aside from all that, plus watching the baseball and working on new stuff, there’s been quite a bit of work going into the home and garden.

Here’s a before and after pic.

Before is what things looked like when we arrived here. After is earlier this week, while work was in progress. Also, obscured by my idiot thumb, is that the sidewalk has been repaired. Obscured by the idiot walls is the work done inside to convert the garage into a room.

So, as you can probably imagine, shit has been hectic.

And this coming week looks to be about the same.

Right now, it’s just nice to put my feet up in the backyard, think about rats in a lemon tree, and smoke a hookah.

After that, sleep maybe but more work, probably.

Continue reading »]]> Shit can only get stranger. The diet guarantees it.

Lilac Chaser from xty on Vimeo.

THE HASHEESH EATER (1857): I haven’t read this book since I was a teenager and I haven’t thought about it since the last time I was hiding under my blankets thinking through the various meanings of “I must”, “you must”, “one must” and so forth but they’re but they’re giving it away.

Cult figure Terence McKenna would describe Ludlow as beginning “a tradition of pharmo-picaresque literature that would find later practitioners in William Burroughs and Hunter S. Thompson.… Part genius, part madman, Ludlow lies halfway between Captain Ahab and P.T. Barnum, a kind of Mark Twain on hashish. There is a wonderful charm to his free-spirited, pseudoscientific openness as he makes his way into the shifting dunescapes of the world of hashish.”

Enlightenment: It’s What’s For Dinner: Before we ate data, people were known to ingest food. Around the time of the enlightenment, when that food started getting processed, there were all sorts of reactions -both for and against– that, to our eyes, appear comical but are telling.

Philosophes, physicians, and the honnêtes hommes of 18th-century polite society could claim that coffee was good for the mind. Chemical experts testified that it gave the “brain a new resource of esprits, sustain[ed] the body during great application & long wakefulness,” replacing the animal spirits which were at risk of being used up in intellectual work. Its “oily, saline, [and] volatile principles,” and the particular way in which its “volatile salts” were bound, remedy “all the bad effects of mental labor.” Voltaire endorsed the causal link between coffee’s volatile salts and the replenishment of spirits and was said to take an astounding 40 cups a day. Rousseau adored the stuff, and commentators ascribed the clearness of Buffon’s thought and prose style to his coffee habit. There were experts for the opposition too. Coffee was a powerful drug: its bitterness allied it with nature’s poisons and its blackness with the diabolical. In the 1780s, a Parisian critic condemned “the black water” that is consumed at the café as “more harmful than the generous wine on which our fathers got drunk,” making men depressed and sarcastic. Coffee might cause weight loss and dysentery; what was beneficial wakefulness to some was pathological overstimulation to others, raising the risk of nervous disease. Voltaire’s physician tried in vain to wean him from the 40-cup habit: the spread of hot drinks in general, the doctor claimed, was causing physical and mental degeneracy. Of all people, those living the life of the mind had the most reason to avoid coffee.

Real world, fake world, irl fetish and so forth.

Back when I first started this blog, hammering away on a stone tablet like Fred Flintstone, I read a badly translated article on or advertisement for sex dolls that read something like: “NO SUCH THING AS WITH RAW GIRL WHEN THERE IS NO AFFINITY.” RAW obviously meant real but was much better than real because it implied no moral judgement. Since then, it’s been a raw world and cooked world to me.

NATHAN FAKE – SENSE HEAD from AVD78 on Vimeo.

Neither is better or more real than the other. Sometimes things are overcooked and you can’t even taste them through the carbon. Other times, raw things are dirty and covered in slugs. Some stuff, fresh off the grill is too hot. Other stuff, straight out of the ground, is too cold. It’s a matter of taste and I have a crush on cast iron. Highly recommend it.

The Flavor Network: Computers are not just engaged with food on a metaphorical level but also on a . . . Errr . . . Computer level. Scientists have mapped out different chemicals to find what flavors should work together.

These unexpected findings fundamentally question our previous notion of flavor pairing. Although the food pairing hypothesis still holds for some cuisines, it appears there are many more desirable flavor combinations available than previously imagined. As researchers continue to examine a wider variety of ingredients and cuisines, we will be able to build even larger, more robust flavor networks to gain insight into the fundamental principles behind our ingredient pairing preferences.

Such flavor networks will also benefit the next generation of “creative” computers. By combining our current knowledge of flavor networks with computer learning, scientists at IBM are now creating adaptive computer systems that will “learn” to create desirable and innovative food combinations. One day, these computers could help create better school lunches or design menus that meet strict dietary restrictions without sacrificing great flavor.

Of course, there’s more to cooking than lists of flavor compounds and networks of ingredients. Factors like color and texture can have play equally important roles in the palatability of a dish. It therefore seems unlikely that a computer will ever be able to replace the creativity and aesthetic prowess of human chefs. But then again, did anyone expect a computer to win Jeopardy?

Although color and texture are, doubtless, really fucking important, this has the taste of something that may be a little overcooked. Also lacking is that eating is not just a function of taste but of being social. I even think that a simple meal, shared with friends, probably tops a perfectly constructed one eaten in front of some glowing screen.

Nightengale: Beer taps after ballgame facing last call: And this isn’t the only effect glowing screens are having on our consumptive social lives. In that weird laboratory of human reactions –pro-sports– baseball players have started finding life in the panoptican a little less friendly than before.

The old-timers say they didn’t linger to get drunk but rather to talk shop, learn about the game and bring together an otherwise disparate group. Yount’s favorite memories growing up in the Milwaukee Brewers clubhouse were listening to Hank Aaron hold court late after games. Arizona manager Kirk Gibson reminisces about the days with Alan Trammell in Detroit and George Brett in Kansas City.

It wasn’t just the beer taps that kept teams together, but the lack of technology. There were no iPhones, iPads, Facebook or Twitter.

“Social media,” veteran third baseman Eric Chavez said, “changed everything. The trust factor went away.”

Just ask Beckett, part of the 2011 Red Sox team lambasted with news reports that pitchers drank beer and ate chicken during games they weren’t scheduled to pitch. This wasn’t a matter of reporters seeing the incidents but someone inside the clubhouse leaking the information.

These days, the clubhouse often is a ghost town by 11 p.m.

We gain less drunk drivers but lose the pleasant circumstances that they emerge from –tottering from the happy clubhouse like a comic strip character burping bubbles until they get in their car and kill a family of children. Who knows if we even gain that much? Just as likely, they drink alone.

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ROBOT COCKROACH SWARM unleashed in Sheffield lab: If you’re ever under some rubble just take a deep breath and relax: Any minute now, robotic cockroaches will swarm over you.

The medical benefits of a programmable group of nanobots are pretty obvious, but the swarm could also have military applications such as search and rescue operations in areas that are dangerous for human.

Interspecies telepathy: human thoughts make rat move: And after the cockroaches pull you out and you discover you can’t move — no worries: Rats and humans have engaged in telepathy.

Yoo says it should be possible for two humans to use a similar system in the foreseeable future. Such a system could, for instance, be used to help a paralysed person relearn to use their limbs by having their therapist initially move them with their mind.

CAN WE PATENT LIFE?: But let’s just hope your genes don’t need any work because, well, you might not own those and your doctor may not be allowed to look.

Moreover, when a company patents a gene, it also patents the rights to what that gene (or any fragment of its DNA) might tell us about our health, including our chances of living or dying. A woman who inherits a harmful version of either of the genes that Myriad has under patent, for example, is five times more likely to develop breast cancer than a woman who does not. She is also at significantly greater risk of developing ovarian cancer. Women who want to know whether they possess those harmful mutations have just one way of finding out: by taking a three-thousand-dollar blood test offered by Myriad Genetics. To seek a second opinion on such a critical issue, their only option is to pay to take the test again. This is because Myriad, as is its right under patent law, has prevented laboratories from performing the test or developing alternative versions. It is important to remember what is at stake: breast cancer kills more women in the Western world than any other kind of cancer. Even the best tests are sometimes wrong; second opinions save lives.

I wonder who owns my bones. Should I be getting a royalties on my genes?

Western black rhino declared extinct: Are my genes worth as much as the Western Black Rhino’s bones?

Overall numbers of black and white rhinos have been rising, but some subspecies have been particularly vulnerable to poaching by criminal gangs who want to trade the animals’ valuable horns.

Simon Stuart, chair of the IUCN Species Survival Commission, told BBC News: “They had the misfortune of occurring in places where we simply weren’t able to get the necessary security in place.

“You’ve got to imagine an animal walking around with a gold horn; that’s what you’re looking at, that’s the value and that’s why you need incredibly high security.”

I need high security to protect my genes from criminal gangs of poachers. Or doctors. Whatever they are. Maybe they’re pirates. You wouldn’t steal a car. So why is it right to steal your own genes?

Criminal gangs of DOCTOR POACHER PIRATES like these have been stealing your genes and treating them without permission!!!

It’s not right. You should buy your genes at auction. And let the free market fix your cancer.

Don’t believe that it will? Perhaps this short instructional video will help.

Radar by GlitchKawaii from GlitchKawaii on Vimeo.

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‘What Ali Wore’: A Fashion Blog Dedicated to the Most Dapper Old Man on the Planet: Just about every day, Zoe Spawton takes a picture of Ali, an 83 year old Turkish tailor, living in Germany, who has 18 kids and a sense of style.

Word of Ali’s new-found fame has even reached his native land, where he is seen as a fashion maverick, breaking down age barriers in a world typically ruled by Bright Young Things.

And . . .

Uncle Ali, as he likes to be called, does have some restrictions, Spawton says.

“Sometimes he just does not feel good, is a bad mood or sick,” she tells the German publication. “Also, if he has the feeling of being not dressed very neatly. Or if he thinks that I have already photographed him in a certain outfit.”

Return of the Edwardian sartorialist – Sambourne’s Kensington street style: Street style pics from a time before Ali was born. Edwardian ladies cleaning, strolling, a little posed, a little candid.

There is probably a great deal to be said about the interest shown in maids by gentlemen of Sambourne’s age and class but in the absence of firm evidence we can probably acquit him of improper thoughts. As has also been discussed on the blog and in comments, the concept of privacy with regard to photographs taken in the street was underdeveloped in Sambourne’s time. It’s probably true that as an upper middle class man he thought that his right to pursue his art outweighed any violation of his subjects’ privacy. (Some photographers still believe that today.)

The Fashion Icons Of Wearable Computing Circa 2000: The clothes of the subjects of street style photography have changed but so has the clothes and equipment of the photographers. It’ll change more.

What may be the world’s first cybernetic hate crime unfolds in French McDonald’s: And there will be a backlash.

The Canadian university professor was at the restaurant with his family when three different McDonalds employees took exception to his “Digital Eye Glass” device and attempted to forcibly remove it from his head. Mann was then physically removed from the store by the employees, along with having his support documentation destroyed.

This may be the first ever recorded assault of a person instigated by the prominent display of a Google Glass-like wearable computer.

Now, I’m not going to say this guy deserved to get beat up in a McDonalds. Very few people deserve that (I have and will again) and I’ve been a  Steve Mann fan (and a fan of men named Steve) for years but, when you go around taking people’s pictures without their permission, you’re crossing a line. You have no right to do that. You’re being intrusive.

You know what can happen then?

That can happen.

And when you call things like this a hate crime, that will happen. I know. I have seen the worm headed ladies with my own eyes. You people are calling them up. Be careful.

Cause, unless the attack was motivated by his disability, it’s not a hate crime. And if it was a hate crime, it’s not a hate crime against a cyborg but one against a person with an eye problem.

As hard as this might be to believe, working in McDonalds may not be the fucking high point of someone’s day or life. Last they want –or I wanted when I was working– was some shithead, rich enough to wear a computer on their face, to be snapping pics of me, without my permission, for the internet.

We are workers. Not your fucking blog-fodder.

Now, someone asks and is nice, it’s a different story.

back in the day.

pic from here

But you can’t assume people want their picture taken. They have to be there. You don’t.

Manchester police to record attacks on goths, emos and punks as hate crimes: Look, I come from a time and a place where having pink hair would cause bottles to fly, cars to pull over and people to beat you up. It happened to me on more than one occasion. I still have a couple marks. Having said that, I don’t think these were “hate-crimes.”

There may have been a strong element of homophobia but that’s another story.

But the thing is, I had a choice about what I wore. And unless we’re going to start calling attacks on gang members for wearing red or blue (or people mistaken as such for doing the same) “hate crimes” too, it’s just the wrong words.

Once again, no one should get beat up. (At least, very few people should.) But hate crime laws are not about protecting the choices you make as a consumer nor should they be.

Anyway, I’m gonna hang out in the living room for a bit and move it like this . . .

LASERDISC VISIONS: Los Santos from Mark Fingerhut on Vimeo.

You should also get some exercise.

Life is very long.

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Just got a tablet and seeing how it works.

Who knows? If the typing doesn’t annoy my huge clumsy fingers too much, maybe there’ll be the odd actual post up in this dump again.

Musings from the yard or some such garbage.

Anyway . . .

Those are potatos. No idea if I have them properly spaced but I stuck some potatoes in the ground and they’re growing like crazy.

Continue reading »]]> A glimpse of one of the guys from Nike’s Innovation Kitchen.

The Innovator from Cineastas on Vimeo.

Mike Friton is a freelance shoemaker, weaver, paper sculptor and innovator with over 30 years of experience at Nike. His innovations are responsible for many elements of athletic footwear that people wear today. Each of his crafts informs one another and he is constantly exploring the fringes of his field. Mike’s work is a great example of how non-traditional methods of exploring one’s craft can lead to unique end results.

If you have any questions or inquiries about Mike and his work, he can be reached at mikefriton@yahoo.com. or (971) 219-6552.

DIRECTOR: Tristan Stoch
DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY: Sean Grasso
SOUND: David Panton

MUSIC BY KEVIN MACLEOD