Boris Anthony

“Art is whatever you can get away with” - Andy Warhol
“Art is making something out of nothing and selling it” - Frank Zappa

You cannot say that a thing is or isn’t art, because if it isn’t, what is it? You get into the game of having to define things, of which there is no getting out.

You cannot say art is good or bad, because good and bad are relative and subjective. Further, they don’t really exist and who the hell do you think YOU are to know the difference?

Your only choice, when presented with art, is to take it or leave it. Take from it whatever and as much as you can, or don’t.

The honest artist will pour everything into his art, precisely so you can keep taking. The cheap artist, well, doesn’t, and so you don’t get much. So you forget it.

In this view, art critics are dubious characters that you should avoid at all costs. They are in the business of making you believe a world of their making.

Art curators, on the other hand, are to be sought out and celebrated. For what they busy themselves with is finding, rounding up and presenting those artists that have something to give, something to say, something to share, that is in some way relevant to the world, now, and you should partake of it.

The work of the art curator is a sort of work of art in itself, so the honesty and cheapness stuff applies to them too.

Let us not underestimate the importance of mimicry in the process of learning and discovery.
How much of who we are is based on whom we’ve met.
How much of how we behave is based on who’ve observed.
What happens when evryone has learnt from watching the same subject?

Turn off your TVs. Now.

The moment where the death of the number of humans required to save humanity would cause an ecological disaster that would seriously harm, if not destroy humanity.

Imagine if 1 billion people dropped dead right now.
And keep in mind that human population was 1 billion less than today in the early 80’s. (i.e. losing a billion people today not only would cause a horrible health problem, but it wouldn’t reduce us to a sustainable number either.)

Imagine 3 billion people… 1/2 of everyone around you right now. Dead and rotting…

Poking around on my Mac the other day I found a neat little util called “pubsub.” It’s a command line tool to interact with Apple’s Publication Subscription Framework.

This framework is used by Apple Mail and Safari, as well as the RSS Screen Saver, to manage their RSS subscriptions.

Curious, I asked it to show me what it was managing, since I don’t use any of those for my RSS reading. In a Terminal window, type:
pubsub list

As expected, Safari, Mail and ScreenSaver had registered themselves with the pubsub service, but had no feeds to manage.

What wasn’t expected was another entry, which was apparently subscribed to over a dozen feeds and was updating them every 15 minutes (as far as I could tell). A whole lot of crap feeds too, like Gawker, Engadget, Wired, PopularMechanics…

Turns out an RSS Aggregator I had launched once, over a year ago, just to take a look at it, uses the pubsub framework and had loaded a bunch of “starter feeds”. Of course, when I deleted the app, it didn’t uninstall itself.

The app in question is Acrylic’s (very nice otherwise) Times aggregator.

When I found this, I shrugged it off. I was busy with other stuff and forgot about it.

Then, earlier today, I was monitoring my system performance–something was running slow–and what do I see pop up to the top of the list for a moment? Pubsub! Is it aggregating?! No way!

I wanted to unsubscribe all those feeds immediatly so that pubsub would stop fetching them needlessly every 15 minutes. Doing this by hand seemed a bit of a P.I.T.A. though.

Thankfully, Times’ FAQ question #2 solved my problem:

Q: How do I remove default feeds?
You can either delete every feed individually, or select Reset Times… from the Times menu in the menubar and click Reset to Empty.

Downloaded the app, reset it, quit it and deleted it again.
Subscriptions gone, no more pointless pubsub network activity and resources swiping.

Why do I post this?
Do you know what’s running in the background on your computer?

I want money to stop.
I want money to stop being something I need to run after.
I want money to stop being something I need to worry after.
I want money to stop being something I get anxious over, and
I want money to stop being something I get screwed over.

I don’t want to have touch money anymore.
I don’t want to have to count or save money anymore.
I don’t want to have to fill out forms and deal with mounds of paperwork because of money anymore.

I don’t want money.
I do not want money anymore.

I don’t believe life is about working hard to make money.
I don’t believe life is about working hard and saving money.

I’d like to believe life is about working hard to do better things.
I’d like to believe life is about working hard to make life better.

I am so very very sick and tired of money.
I really really really hate money.

Celebrity is something only coveted by those who have no experience–direct or indirect–of it, at any scale; and the ego-maniacally insane.

I like dates. I buy them every so often and when I do, I really enjoy them.
Medjool dates seem to be what is mostly on offer around here, so a bit of googling.

Wikipedia about dates in general.

Notice how “Western Date Ranches” in California/Arizona snapped up the domain.

This is my favorite part (other than eating them of course):

Google Street view of where the dates I am enjoying are grown and harvested:

and where they are processed:

(you can just make out the company name on the front of the building)

Train your eye and your vision lusts after colour.
Train your ear , and you long for beautiful sound.
Delight in doing good, and your natural kindness is blown out of shape.
Delight in righteousness, and you become righteous beyond all reason.
Overdo liturgy, and you turn into a ham actor.
Overdo your love of music, and you play corn.
Love of wisdom leads to wise contriving.
Love of knowledge leads to faultfinding.
- Way of Chuang Tzu

on continue