Charge your phone with a solar-powered bra. // The tobacco-free rechargeable cigarette. // Lovely, toxic nudibranchs. (h/t, io9.) // Enduring hardship in a darker age. // Joshua Hoffine’s nightmares. // Turkey’s evil Spider-Man. He’s evil, and cheap. // The museum of black superheroes. // Iron Man titles. // Iron Man fan. // Crotch weapons. More. // The barbecue sword. // Abandoned Russian tank base. // Robot oddments. // BSG: Guess What’s Coming to Dinner? // Pixelporn. (sfw.) // Brian Micklethwaite on an age of political landslides. // Norman Geras on the Guardian’s fondness for Hamas. // WorldWide Telescope™. // Lunch Inside the 12 Galaxies. (h/t, Candice.) // James Burke’s The Day the Universe Changed. Western civilisation and the habit of invention. (h/t, Maggie’s Farm.) // Self-balancing electric unicycle. // The a.frame.fix concept bike. Or the Strida, which folds. // Vintage broadcast microphones. (h/t, Coudal.) // Music and Life. // And, via The Thin Man, it’s Astrud Gilberto.

In the L.A. Times, P.J. O’Rourke offers some unlikely commencement advice. Two items in particular caught my eye.

On idealism:

Don’t be an idealist. Don’t chain yourself to a redwood tree. Instead, be a corporate lawyer and make $500,000 a year. No matter how much you cheat the IRS, you’ll still end up paying $100,000 in property, sales and excise taxes. That’s $100,000 to schools, sewers, roads, firefighters and police. You’ll be doing good for society. Does chaining yourself to a redwood tree do society $100,000 worth of good? Idealists are also bullies. The idealist says, “I care more about the redwood trees than you do. I care so much I can’t eat. I can’t sleep. It broke up my marriage. And because I care more than you do, I’m a better person. And because I’m the better person, I have the right to boss you around.”

And, on fairness:

Forget about fairness. We all get confused about the contradictory messages that life and politics send. Life sends the message, “I’d better not be poor. I’d better get rich. I’d better make more money than other people.” Meanwhile, politics sends us the message, “Some people make more money than others. Some are rich while others are poor. We’d better close that ‘income disparity gap’. It’s not fair!” Well, I am here to advocate for unfairness. I’ve got a 10-year-old at home. She’s always saying, “That’s not fair.” When she says this, I say, “Honey, you’re cute. That’s not fair. Your family is pretty well off. That’s not fair. You were born in America. That’s not fair. Darling, you had better pray to God that things don’t start getting fair for you.”

Via.

I thought I’d post a footnote of sorts to yesterday’s item on Professor Caroline Guertin, she of the limpid prose and limitless expertise. Here are a few short extracts from Guertin’s essay, Wanderlust: The Kinesthetic Browser in Cyberfeminist Space, published in 2007 by the Online Journal of Embodiment & Technology.

The shuffling and unfolding of the information of her body in sensory space is enacted across a gap or trajectory of subjecthood that is multiple and present. Subjectivity is the lens and connector through which the spatio-temporal dislocation gets focused and bridged. The gap is outside vision — felt not seen — and always existing on the threshold in between nodes. Like the monster’s subjectivities, all knots in the matrix are linked.

Think about that for a moment. Ponder its majesty.

Nudged into motion, the meandering subject in cyberfeminist space is a comet in orbit around her own story, around her subjective experience of a text that keeps changing, spinning off into an uncharted future. According to Paul Virilio, we are no longer beings who inhabit a temporal plane. Instead, in Open Sky, he argues we have become passive agents who are acted upon like film — exposed, underexposed, overexposed — and are nakedly subject to the effects of light speed.

And,

We inhabit our bodies differently when we are out of phase, oscillating in the turbulence of dynamic space, that space where the textual body is written as contextual knot. The ways of moving in virtual space are directed and mapped by the knots that span spatio-temporal rifts. Without movement, we cannot cross the space-time divide.

Or maybe,

The textual voyage is alive and kinetic, fractal and in flux, birthed as she travels through its fullness.

I suppose one could view the extracts above, and the essay from which they’re taken, as a sort of extended Zen kōan, insofar as they defy rational understanding and all known aesthetic criteria. More sceptical souls may wonder if these passages are in fact the results of some kind of seizure or medical condition, of which we must not speak.

I should, in fairness, point out that the Online Journal of Embodiment & Technology does feature more substantial aesthetic and intellectual works, including Courtney Stricklin’s Yawn, a written variation of a video piece that invites readers to record the number of times they yawn while reading it. (Stricklin has, helpfully, punctuated the text with marks indicating how many times she yawned while writing it.) Stricklin’s biography informs us,

While Courtney would never have guessed that her future would be in the arts, it came as no surprise to her highly artistic family.

No less impressive is Thrash: Physical Responses to the Bush Administration, by Andrew Simonet and Headlong Dance Theatre, a company which creates 

award winning experimental and experiential dances with/for the entire body, including the face, the voice, and the mind.

Readers will be thrilled to discover that Thrash is an ongoing project in which members of the public are welcome to participate: 

No performance experience necessary. Here’s the idea: you listen to speeches by George W. Bush. Then you move in front of a video camera for four minutes. No movement too strange, too ugly, or too crazy. Whatever comes out is part of Thrash. I edit the results into [a] short compilation, a cathartic DIY video, a belligerent home movie of an infuriating time… Don’t worry about being (1) good, (2) original, (3) interesting.

A video of the results is available here. Go on, watch it. It’s a thing of beauty.

Update:

Over at University Diaries, The Myth attempts a rather heroic translation of Guertin’s prose.

Feel free to compensate me.

I’ve previously noted the readiness with which some commentators inform “us” of how “we” feel about a given subject. This eerie divination reveals, remarkably often, that “we” feel almost exactly as the author does. Another example of this preternatural knowledge comes courtesy of Professor Carolyn Guertin, whose areas of expertise include,   

Digital media, cyberfeminism, digital narrative, hypertext, new media arts, digital design, information aesthetics, participatory cultures, Web 2.0 technologies, women’s writing, cyberculture, media literacy, science fiction…

And,

Hacktivism, born-digital arts and literatures, cultural studies, postliteracy and the social practices surrounding technology.

Some readers may remember Professor Guertin for her doctoral dissertation on “quantum feminisms,” discussed at length here, and which includes such dazzling insights as,

Within quantum mechanics, the science of the body in motion, the intricacies of the interiorities of mnemonic time – no longer an arrow – are being realized in the (traditionally) feminized shape of the body of the matrix.

And,

Where women have usually been objects to be looked at, hypermedia systems replace the gaze with the empowered look of the embodied browser in motion in archival space. Always in flux, the shape of time’s transformation is a Möbius strip unfolding time into the dynamic space of the postmodern text, into the ‘unfold’.

Now here’s a thing. Pixeloo has produced a striking, indeed alarming, rendering of a certain cartoon patriarch. Click image for full effect.

The artist adds,

Slightly less disturbing are the renderings of Mario and Jessica Rabbit. The “untooning” process can be seen here.