Even inanimate objects get into the Stanley Cup Spirit in Vangroover.
Via Flickr:Girl In A Wetsuit by Elek Imredy
bronzelife-sizeStanley ParkVancouver, British ColumbiaTo create the bronze statue, sculptor Elek Imredy first took a mold of the top surface of the rock. In his studio, he made a replica of the rock and modeled the figure in clay. A plaster of paris mold was made from the clay figure and the sculpture was cast in fibreglass. This fibreglass figure was flown to Rome where it was cast in bronze.On June 9th, 1972, the sculpture was set in place by a crane reaching out from shore to the rock 8o feet away and fastened to the stone with stainless steel bolts. The next day the sculpture was ceremoniously unveiled. Girl in a Wetsuit has become a landmark for visitors to Stanley Park and to boats that enter the harbour.
Anonymous vs the Police which is not exactly a new thing
Dear Nonymite: you do realize you’re flipping off the photographer, not the cops, right? Jesus, EVERYONE hates the paparazzi!
Compare and contrast to our earlier Nony in London:
Work it, V!
This is a democracy! VOTE, DAMMIT!!!
Whichever you prefer, the mere existence of Anonymous reminds us that the present moment, yes, this exact moment, is one that has never come before, and will never exist again. It won’t be long until existing power structures have either shattered into a new, digital Brownian Motion model of solipsistic yet collaborative civilization OR the fascists have infiltrated and wiped out the free thinkers, resulting in something akin to the Orwellian KleptoReich that Putin’s got going in Russia.
And that, my friends, reminds me of this, from the great prophet Hunter S. Thompson. Think carefully about these words, because for just this particular second of time, they apply again.
“It seems like a lifetime, or at least a Main Era — the kind of peak that never comes again. San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run… but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant…
History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit, but even without being sure of ‘history’ it seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the time — and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened
My central memory of that time seems to hang on one or five or maybe forty nights — or very early mornings — when I left the Fillmore half-crazy and, instead of going home, aimed the big 650 Lightning across the Bay Bridge at a hundred miles an hour… booming through the Treasure Island tunnel at the lights of Oakland and Berkeley and Richmond, not quite sure which turnoff to take when I got to the other end… but being absolutely certain that no matter which way I went I would come to a place where people were just as high and wild as I was: no doubt at all about that…
There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda… You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning…
And that, I think, was the handle — that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply PREVAIL. There was no point in fighting — on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave…
So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark — that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.”
Where will you be when it does?
UPDATED: a couple of hours after I posted this, I found the following video, which claims to lay out the one-year plan of Anonymous. Presenting The Plan:
“While the truncheon may be used in lieu of conversation, words will always retain their power.”
I have a copy of the Manual of Afghani Jihad (the CIA translation) and selections from the Japanese Kamikaze documents, and said back then that if we in the West had any documents as spiritually compelling as those, we would have no alienated teens, no existential crises. It’s literally unthinkable to most people in the affluent nations that their individual lives could actually have meaning; why is this so, when their nations wield the greatest financial and political power on the planet? When they enjoy personal freedoms undreamed-of in most of civilization and throughout history? Why is this, when destitute citizens of the poorest states on Earth change history every day as if it’s their birthright?
And it is.
Could this video and plan from Anonymous actually be That Call, the call to the hearts of the people of the West, for which we have been waiting?
No, it’s a FACT. Now that you truly understand the reason for war, it’s time to put the nail in the coffin of your optimism with today’s roundup of pointless celebrity gossip.
Many and varied are the treasures of the internet, and the greatest of these may be HaikuFinder. After spending far too much time trying to download and run the damn thing (okay, i got the program…and now I need to install Python? And then I need to hack a workaround into Vista, which won’t run Python? And then I need to disable my virus protection so it can run? and whatever, dudes) I find out there’s a website. Paste in the words aye wallah! Your Haiku: dey are fownd.
So, presumably the Python script etcetera exist so you can Haiku-ify top secret documents without the off-chance that Wikileaks will find your sooper-sekrit poetry stash? Okay then!
In related news, it’s obvious to the most casual observer of the Contemporary Poetry Scene that we are not the first to take a stab at finding the poetry in Palinisms: There was Slate’s fictional Palintry roundup, The Utne Reader’s architectonic analysis of an interview, Prospect Magazine (yes, even in the UK, which reminds me, did you see Mike Tyson at the Oxford Union? Oscar Wilde is spinning like a turbine, I’m telling you), and, of course, a year later the Huffington Post. And this book:
Tap that!
And, of course,William Fucking Shatner.
As you may be aware, the Great State and Future Province of Alaska has recently released all of Sarah Palin’s emails (now, Republicknuts, keep your panties on: they’re redacted) for your reading pleasure, and we at the ol’ raincoaster blog have taken this one step further by running said emails through the HaikuFinder, and here are the results [who, by the way, is this “Tibbles” who gets cc’d in on so much? Her cat?]:
raincoaster 