Brain Diseases I Wish I Had

"The vast majority of mp3 enthusiasts - the millions of people who transfer mp3 files around the Internet via Napster-style file sharing software, or via IRC, or Usenet, or whatever - are probably blissfully unaware of all the arguments which take place concerning lame v Fraunhofer, 128k v 192k, CBR v VBR, stereo v joint stereo - and good luck to them! However, once people start to acquire a basic level of knowledge concerning the mechanics of audio compression, they almost inevitably gravitate towards the opinion that "Joint Stereo Is BAD"..." But is it?

William Burroughs Book Covers

This land like a mirror turns you inward
And you become a forest in a furtive lake;
The dark pines of your mind reach downward,
You dream in the green of your time,
Your memory is a row of sinking pines.

Explorer, you tell yourself this is not what you came for
Although it is good here, and green;
You had meant to move with a kind of largeness,
You had planned a heavy grace, an anguished dream.

But the dark pines of your mind dip deeper
And you are sinking, sinking, sleeper
In an elementary world;
There is something down there and you want it told.

Dark Pines Under Water by Gwendolyn MacEwen

Potatoes are in the nightshade family. Nightshade, as in Deadly Nightshade.

Do NOT eat potatoes which are green under the skin or bitter tasting. Even if you avoid the green parts, they can still be poisonous.

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He comes across the granite yard,
Grizzled feather glint in his black wings.
He strokes the tree, the water and the cat,
Glances at the mirror of the day.


And the pond shivers though the wind has stilled,
And the cat on the doorsill attacks the air
Like a mouse. The tree's blood begins to jell,
Day falls in stains on the brown grass.


The hundred year old oak door
Screeches like a newborn. Through yellow fog
The patient's eyes see: rainbows
Slump to earth like cackling parrots.


The clock counts out the time for the living,
A spider hangs his web among the stars,
And the angel, having entered the hearth,
Turns into smoke, ashes, embers.


Death's Angel by Henrikas Radauskas

If you're traveling in the wilderness, or at sea, or anywhere else where being found may save your life, you might want to invest in a personal locator beacon. Here are the results of two tests of various PLBs: 1 2

Overhydration does not equal good hydration

Make your own energy gels

Ever wonder how to coil cables so that they don't tangle? Here's how.

Why I'm not an "Ultralight" backpacker

What items should a good waiter carry with them at all times?

A Spotting Guide to the Common Dalek

Word of the day:

    jejune: vapid, uninteresting, childish, immature

"de vries' first and perhaps most important work in this context was the installation `16 dm2 wiese' (16 dm2 meadow) dating from 1974, exhibited in the Vleeshal in Middelburg in 1979. For this work, he dug up a square with a side length of 40 cm out of a meadow, took it apart and completely filled the walls of a relatively large room with the individual, pressed plants, each glued on to a piece of paper..."

"herman and Susanne are sitting together in the forest near Eschenau in the autumn, between them is a large board with a sheet of paper attached to it. As the leaves fall from the trees they glue them on to the paper, exactly where they have landed."

"The library was founded in 1970 when three collectors merged their private libraries. It was named for the 19th-century author of the first full-length work of drug literature written by an American (who was known as "the American De Quincey"), and the first book about cannabis or hashish experience in the English language — The Hasheesh Eater (1857)...

At this writing, the reputation of the Ludlow Library (although it has been largely inactive for the last decade) has grown to almost mythic status among those working and collecting in the psychoactive drug field. No comparable resource exists for scholarly research. This is largely due to the vision of the library’s founders and directors, who were educated members of the antiquarian book trade while at the same time participants in the 1960s counterculture. As the first to acknowledge and uncover the existence of a vast literature of drug experience, they ultimately served to reverse the neglect in which drug literature was previously held."

The Fitz Hugh Ludlow Memorial Library

"Patriotism is the willingness to kill and be killed for trivial reasons." --Bertrand Russell

"I saw the murderers and I saw the victims
It was just courage, not compassion, that I lacked..." --Bertolt Brecht

"Never believe anything until it is officially denied." --Claud Cockburn

"During the 1970s, I filmed secretly in Czechoslovakia, then a Stalinist dictatorship. I interviewed members of the dissident group, Charter 77. One of them, the novelist Zdener Urbanek, told me, “We are more fortunate than you in the West, in one respect. We believe nothing of what we read in the newspapers and watch on television, nothing of the official truth. unlike you, we have learned to read between the lines of the media. unlike you, we know that that real truth is always subversive.”" --John Pilger, Journalism as a Weapon of War