Another hodge podge but with a bonus R.E.M.

During my plunder of a closing Borders, I picked up R.E.M.'s And I Feel Fine: Best of the IRS Years retrospective.  As the title suggests it does cover their time with that record label, pretty much everything from their incipient stages to 1987's "The One I Love."   It's a good collection if you prefer their early sound like I do, back when it was done with a paucity of production.  That is not to say that I haven't liked their work in recent years.  In fact, their latest record, Collapse Into Now, seems quite promising from what I've heard.  I especially am enamored with "Discoverer."  Greg Kot from The Chicago Tribune wasn't happy with it in his review.  Oh well, maybe he just wants them to remake Automatic for the People, or something.  Oh who am I kidding?  Kot likes Wilco...and the blues...and Wilco...and that's about it.  You can get And I Feel Fine: Best of the IRS Years as well as other R.E.M. albums at Amazon or iTunes.

On Facebook today, John Shirley raised a valid point regarding the nuclear crisis in Japan.  That nation is well known for being on the forefront of robotics.  There are great many remote controlled drones and robots that are often employed in search and rescue and other efforts.  Why aren't there robots being sent into the reactors as opposed to having fifty fatigued men take the rads while helicopters dump water on the plant?  Seemed like a low-tech approach to Shirley and honestly it does to me too.  Dr. Michio Kaku is already calling for the Chernobyl approach: get the Japanese Air Force to fly over and dump concrete and boron over the whole complex, basically entombing the fucker.  Having already ruined the plant with seawater, I'd call that a good approach.

A professor at the Brain Mind Institute in Switzerland is using virtual reality to locate the point of origin for our sense of self....that feeling that we are inside our own body.  Is he looking for the actual soul?  Perhaps we'll see a virtual reality representation of it, but I'm not certain that's exactly what the man's after.

We're the Aliens.  It's the concept that the DNA progenitors that brought about life on our world really came from "out there."  Not exactly a new idea, but one that is beginning to gain more momentum in scientific circles.  I believe Francis Crick, one of the co-discoverers of DNA even supported this theory.

Aging is always on my mind.  I'm older than I want to be (as many people are) and have thus far wasted my time here in this life.  I have four minor publications to my credit, piles of books in my home, several writings that remain in the first or second draft stage and I don't feel like climbing the mountain further to redraft and get them submitted, five rejection letters to PhD programs, and endless scribbles in notebooks.  I am so lucky in many ways, but my life is absent one crucial factor: success.  That primate sense of purpose.

But there are those who only get better with age and here is ample evidence:

Happy Birthday to William Gibson!  The godfather of cyberspace!

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