Currently browsing 'apocalypse'
War of the Worlds
So here’s the apocalyptic side to “a festival of lights”. So it’s fine and dandy to witness the glories of the cosmos (like the recent Geminids meteor shower) and have near religious experiences in the process. Here’s what f*cks with your head either as a series of coincidences accompanying the shower, or the government trying to subtly tell you something:
- The Syfy (Scifi) channel or some channel was showing back to back movies about alien invasions. I couldn’t help but watch “War of the Worlds” which turned out to be a very, very bad idea. The remake of War of the Worlds plays on pretty much every fear you could have: alien ship attacks, alien robot attacks, air planes going down, drowning in cars, Titanic-like boat going down, aliens that incinerate you indiscriminately, aliens that capture you and put you in a metal farmers’ market basket until they are ready to thrust their tentacle through you and suck out all of your blood, human kind’s extermination, mob hysteria, loosing your child, apocalypse. For those who didn’t see the new War of the Worlds: the aliens arrive in a stream of lightening bolts from the sky. So I couldn’t help but have a lump in my throat while watching the Geminids meteor shower.
- Also, for some reason, the powers that be seem to be testing the “Emergency Alert System” out. A lot. You know, that horrible nuclear bomb alert sound followed by, “This is a test of the Emergency Broadcast system. If this had been an actual emergency…” Those who saw War of the Worlds will know that this same message was being broadcasted during the alien invasion, saying “this is a TEST of the emergency broadcast system”–a test– even though it was sure damn well past an emergency. This test was playing on my TV upon my return of watching the Geminids meteor shower. These series of events are a great way to become an insomniac, but I don’t know if I was scared or more annoyed by the fact that the announcement said “this is a test of New Jersey’s emergency broadcast system”. New Jersey? I’m not in New Jersey! Are you telling me that in the event of an emergency Inwoodites are screwed because Manhattan forgets we exist and New Jersey is calling us theirs even though there is a freakin river between us? Inwoodites better start building rafts and canoes because it looks like we will be screwed.
- The Hadron seems to be up and running again.
The broadcast alerts are still going on… Just when War of the Worlds was receding from my mind a day later, as I dozed off with a smile on my face listening to Craig Furgeson, suddenly, in the middle of one of his jokes, the horrible nuclear bomb alert sound blasted like a siren with a “test” message. Success in finding a sound that will jerk anyone out of a soundful sleep.
So take it as fiction and believe what you will. The arts are a great way to send mass messages to people: either to have us buy something, to act a certain way, to serve as a mirror for our fears and desires, or to subtly prepare us for an alien invasion.
End time tools are up again
The Large Hadron Collider has started up again. Watchers: Start logging any anomalies you encounter: rips in time, premonitions of doom (or the return of paradise), aliens, formations of star gates, etc.
Mission: Space
Wannabe Astronauts, Trekkies, and Nova-sympathizers, listen up: If you want the thrill of your life and don’t have millions of dollars or the balls for the real thing, Mission: Space should be your pilgrimage in life. It might very well be the closest thing you’ll have to a real space odyssey. A spiritually uplifting moment (to make up from the tears of joy shed on the Silver Golf Ball, to be blogged about soon) that I can only describe as a mind-f*ck if it wasn’t real and I didn’t really go to Mars. Mission: Space – continue reading …
where I won’t be tomorrow
photo by Luc Viatour
Nova is gearing up for some new odysseys, but she’ll tell you one place she aint going to be. That would be the moon, given looney-tunes NASA has decided it needed to shoot the equivalent of a missile into it “to see what happens”. Sounds very much like a bunch of little boys detonating fireworks in places they really shouldn’t be, though talking about it in a language appropriate for their ages and nerdiness : “LCROSS Centaur Separation… Mission operations is initiating the breaking maneuver. This will create the 4 minute, 373 mile (600 km) separation planned for optimal data of the Centaur Impact Flash and debris plume. The breaking burn is 4 min 5 sec. in duration.”
Break out the apocalypse kits! Women will simultaneously get their periods across the globe, massive tidal waves will engulf our coasts, and the alien base hidden in the moon’s core will become activated and aim their cannons at earth. All because we wanted to see what happened.
No following NASA missions for me this time around! I’ll be home with my duct tape.
Scorched Earth Policy here at home
Last month, urban odyssey blogger C-mixto wrote an entry on the elusive white tiger of Inwood: a white cat that hunts pigeons in the grasslands of an abandoned lot on Broadway near Academy. Last week I passed by and saw a man with a chemical tank on his back hosing down the entire field. Didn’t look good. No chance of that being environmentally gentle liquid in that ghostbusters backpack.
So… how sad was it to walk by the lot today and see…. THIS!
Yes we have a scorched earth policy in Inwood, it seems. At first glance my heart glowed with a romantic hope that this vision was autumn’s hand painting the landscape a crisp gold. I told myself that it was a field of wheat swaying in the winds, not the corpses of a variety of plant life. Who would notice this, if you didn’t see that the field was green just a few days ago? Perhaps there is no relation between the man with the tank and the sudden death of every growing thing in that spacious lot, but chances are… It’s worth writing about.
Man-made apocalypse in an Inwood lot! Was it weeds he wanted to get rid of? The rats (as the sign advertises)? Sigh… should we now question every single natural beauty we see in our urban landscapes as being a man-made invention, a pot of contamination? Where will the white tiger hunt now?
get ready: end-time, black holes, mutants, aliens or the status quo
The latest news is that the Large Haldron Collider is set to restart sometime soon. If you recall, fellow nerds and Henny Pennies, the Large Haldron Collider is a massive particle accelerator situated between ….it doesn’t matter where it’s situated- it’s situated close to all of us. Scientists are seeking to recreate Genesis by colliding two proton beams together at close to the speed of light. The theory is that this will shed light on the Big Bang and our universe’s origins.
Now the thing had started last year for about a week with the protons doing their warmup lap, until it malfunctioned. They’ve been repairing it ever since, now with a rumored start date of November 2009. Theories abound by the sci-fi minded about the intelligence of doing such a thing. Will we conjure doomsday? Will this create a black hole that will slowly swallow earth by 2012? Will this become a stargate for those Aliens that made the pyramids to return or those visitors seen by Ezekiel? Some say everything will discontinue to exist in a BLINK. If the answer is no to all of these scenarios, and the physicists are right–they discover the origins of life and the God particle, then I imagine life could be very boring–we’re left without a mystery to chase anymore, and will play with our thumbs and stare at each other until it’s time to die.
first summer day in NYC 2009
Mark the date, August 10th 2009. First real summer day in NYC in 2009. Pathetic.
Unfulfilled prophecy (thus far)
Williamsburg, Brooklyn NYC July 2009
Not true so far. What happened?
Does the story change the act?
I was watching “Star Wars: Episode II: Attack of the Clones” (again) a few nights ago on Spike TV, blogging between the uninteresting fight scenes, eyes glued when the screen flashed with the evolving love story of Anakin and Padmé and warring rage of young man Anakin. By the end of the Star Wars prequels I was left with a haunting dilemma that I want to ask you readers about. We were introduced to Darth Vader as a full blown Sith, destroyer of planets, merciless killer, the Jungian shadow of the omnipotent patriarch. Darth Vader was a dark mystery. Human? Barely if at all, with his respirator and dark side powers. But in the prequels there is no Darth Vader yet (until the last scene). There is a story of a young man of impoverished background, fatherless, then motherless, and at one with a deep, soul-felt love that he soon looses too. The story of Vader is Anakin, a man who loved so deeply and so troubled by an intense connection to the force, he became an Angel of Death. Does the story change the act? – continue reading …
Siciliano Street Cookie
Had my eye out for Street Cookie in Sicily. Surely in the land of Don Corleone Street Cookie would lurk. Spent a good deal of my excursions with a special eye on the sidewalk, looking for a face peering out from the concrete for some seemingly misplaced random object sitting lonely on the surface of the ground.
A true mafioso, Street Cookie was incognito. But I knew I found him in a market in the Sicilian city of Syracuse. Here he is: Siciliano Street Cookie – continue reading …
