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mugwump jissom: May 2008

Monday, May 12, 2008

Sometimes people speak a English

There is really no such thing as a global language. English may be the language of international exchange, but languages are meant to be spoken. Every time people around the world speak English, they invent a new version--just as immigrants did so many times in America, saving our language from the nasty fate of sophistication. It turns out that Eastern Europe is a major site of innovation. In Hungary, inspired by his "black brothers, Dre, Snoop, Puff, L, Tupac Shakur, rest in peace," the rapper Speak, who learned English while working at a hotel, combines a pleasant anti-war message with total cultural confusion:

Of course, leave it to the new repository for aesthetic genius, the Pop Idol franchise, which like McDonald's can survive in any climate, to show us the joys of Bulgarian English:

Monday, May 5, 2008

Micro-narratives of mourning


A moment of noise for the great scientist Albert Hoffman, who died last week at the age of 102 after discovering a new form of software for the human machine. It was William Gibson who described "cyberspace" as a "consensual hallucination"; when Hoffman first inadvertently plugged himself into the network called lysergic acid diethylamide, he helped to accelerate a process which would allow us to understand new uses for the human brain. Cyberspace, virtual reality, already exist in the brain, once one has installed the necessary information, which it is up to us to develop and discover. Hoffman said of his discovery, “I think that in human evolution it has never been as necessary to have this substance LSD. It is just a tool to turn us into what we are supposed to be.” There is a lesson to be learned from his long life; as Joe Hill said as he faced the firing squad, "Don't mourn; organize." The memory of Albert Hoffman should be the spirit of affirmation, dedicated to young scientists around the world today who refuse to put knowledge in the service of the state, and choose to produce and disseminate new and infinite possibilities of life.