"The Fizzer Worm is a Curious Yellow-like worm. It infects Windows systems through a variety of paths, takes control of them, coordinates subsequent infection attempts using an IRC channel. It gets code-updates from a Geocities webpage, so that it can mutate to avoid anti-virus software.

A coalition of IRC operators who've banded together to fight the worm have hijacked the Geocities webpage that Fizzer uses to update itself and they've posted a poison-pill to it. The next time the worm checks for its update, it will download a set of instructions that tell it to uninstall itself." (via Boing Boing)

Usually, it's Westerners who invent artificial languages. Here's the first one invented by a Korean. (Warning: if your browser is Netscape this site will make it crash.)

This site (via Salam Pax) is sort of a gateway to the wonderful world of Muslim Blogs.

Buying in order to define a sensibility. Unbalanced, unless there is also principled divestiture (askesis). To see divestiture as honor—honoring the Void.

Amateurism. Only an amateur believes in the magical efficacy of procedures.

What Buddhism lost from Taoism is its CLOWNS.

“ ‘…No artist paints his own Dreaming. It’s too powerful. It might kill him.’ “ --The Songlines

What addicts us are the METAPHORS for freedom.

“I see the devil can quote Wittgenstein.
He’s blacker than he’s painted.” --Randall Jarrell

“That anyone who dressed so very badly as did Thomas Carlyle should have tried to construct a philosophy of clothes has always seemed to me one of the most pathetic things in literature.” --Max Beerbohm

For my crimes against poetry I am sentenced to logorrhea.

Desire is the part of the Mystery that moves.

Saving Private Lynch. (via Metafilter)

“Leave only three wasps alive in the whole of Europe and the air of Europe will still be more crowded with wasps than space is with stars.” --Sir James Jeans

“The artist who realizes himself inside art will never be creative.” --Witold Gombrowicz

Macaronic pop songs, from “Amore” to “Psycho Killer” & “Loser”.

“ ‘A strangely striped strip of string’ is far too emphatic in sound for its sense, and ‘a terribly powerful Florida hurricane’ is not nearly emphatic enough.” --Robert Graves

“Prostitutes, Kvass finds himself thinking, are paperbacks while affairs are hard cover.” --Gather in the Hall of the Planets

Decadence—when pastiche is the norm.

“For the flying saucer myth, it will always be January 1950.” --Curtis Peebles, Watch the Skies

“…I have also expressed doubts that his [Nabokov’s] aesthetic models—chess puzzles and protective colorations in lepidoptera—can be very helpful ideals for the rest of us.” --John Updike

One day materialism will mean that all things are artist’s material; spirituality, that all things are perfected form already; and no paradox. This word Art is a name for the paradox. There are others.

The Thread Out is another Labyrinth. –sayings of Asmodeus

“There is no law saying that the burlesque of a thing may not appear before the thing itself.” --R A Lafferty

In the end, it becomes a question of whether people who are intolerant will continue to count more than their actual numbers in a putative democracy. So far, the answer is Yes. The trouble is, people too easily see social decay as a problem of excessive autonomy, rather than of deficient reciprocity. This gives the fascists a loophole a mile wide...

Every thought is a palindromic prime.

Is there any point in an invention which would show you the sufferings of people on other planets, without giving you the power to halt it?

I don’t suffer for Art, but I suffer for Chess.

Writings on anarchism are like art criticism for an artform no one yet has practiced.

Nothingness, the ultimate McGuffin.

Reincarnation works for me only as a source of jokes. I told a friend that Crowley’d come back as Leo Buscaglia. She said, “That’s sick!”

‘ “If one man has an idea, that just means that many others will have the same idea at the same time. Anyone who doesn’t see that doesn’t know what an idea is. Thoughts are contagious, even if they are not expressed; perhaps most contagious when they are not expressed.” ‘ --Gustav Meyrink, The Green Face (1916; tr Mike Mitchell 1992)

‘How good bad music and bad reasons sound when one marches against an enemy!’ --Nietzsche

Father knows best. (via This Modern World weblog)

"Tourists are terrorists with cameras. Terrorists are tourists with guns." --Andrei Codrescu, Road Scholar

Sisyphus invented Progress. --sayings of Asmodeus

"If the rhinoceros wrote with his horn, publication would make it tingle." --Gerald Burns

"For natives of Petersburg, the despair of oncoming winter is the natural symbol of all other despairs." --Avril Pyman, The Life of Aleksandr Blok

The Butterfly Alphabet.

The Lojban Group recently received this email:

“Hi,I visited your site and found that it's the biggest website I've ever
visited.I think logban is an attack to the modern languages such as
Turkish,Finnish,German,French,Italian,Spanish and the other modern languages.I
also think that you are colonist or imperialist.It's a good way to have
forgotten the main identities and languages of the countries.I absolutely know
that language is the most important part of Nationalism.If a country's hasn't
got it's own language,the country bound to lose itself.Stop introducing lojban
language.Every country use their own language OK? You stated that lojban is an
international language.What a silly idea! It's a good method of Globalization
Game. Give up using lojban. Go your roots. I know you will ignore this mail but
I'm not stupid and people are not stupid who think samely with me. This is my
comment about lojban. No lojban,no globalism,no colonism,no imperialism. You
can't kill our main languages. Bye............


ONUR”

In traffic, the only way to punish another driver is to wreck your own car. --That's war in a nutshell.

"John Jay Chapman said of Browning that God did duty in his work as noun, verb, adjective, adverb, interjection and preposition, and the same is true of History with Trotsky." --Edmund Wilson, To the Finland Station (1940)

'To display oneself naked is not the same as telling the story of one's life.' --Bernard Arcand, The Jaguar and the Anteater (tr Wayne Grady, 1993)

After our poet's-home coffeehouse closed, i said capitalism was like the sow that eats her own piglets. "There are 500 year old bars in Europe. That's because there wasn't capitalism 500 years ago."

What a debacle for the human spirit to have come to, that new art is not eagerly received as a miracle in the land; that so many want to make art who aren't even artists. And then, that being an artist entails that one must neither complain about the overproduction of effigies & try to curtail it (however ineffectually; that's a task left seemingly to nonartists) nor indeed, even refer to this situation in or out of one's work; but also, that one accept the near-certainty of being buried in this superfluous abundance landfill-bound--without letting it stain the pure art-ness of the now-compromised product. AN IMPOSSIBLE SITUATION. And how much longer, no one can even guess.

It is typically intellectual to assume that problems can be solved by language alone, just as it is typically antiintellectual to assume that language cannot solve problems at all. Imagine these attitudes transferred, say, to a hammer.

"There is no escape through death from the supreme necessity of self-conquest." --Lafcadio Hearn, Japan's Religions

    'Finale

It does not moan or murmur now, the sea,
The sea.

A dreamless field and colorless, the sea,
The sea.

Pitiful, too, the sea,
The sea.

Clouds without reflections move the sea,
The sea.

It yields its bed to dismal mists, the sea,
The sea.

It too, look now, is dead, the sea,
The sea.'

--Ungaretti

I nearly fell for it myself.

From the New York Times:

"Today, black smoke billowed over Baghdad's skyline as looters set fire to the city's former telephone communications center, apparently as a distraction for others who tried to steal cars nearby.

On the other side of the city, hundreds of looters, who now range through the city every day, poured into a former palace of Saddam Hussein after American military units decided to vacate it.

Baghdad is once again becoming a city of almost hourly eruptions of gunfire. Criminals are shooting at other criminals, officials said. Families are settling scores, and some Iraqis are just taking potshots at American forces."

Even Lt Smash is relieved to hear that Salam Pax has posted on his blog again...

"Man knows that there are in the soul tints more bewildering, more numberless, and more nameless than the colors of an autumn forest. ...Yet he seriously believes that these things can every one of them, in all their tones and semi-tones, in all their blends and unions, be accurately represented by an arbitrary system of grunts and squeals. He believes that an ordinary civilized stockbroker can really produce out of his own inside noises which denote all the mysteries of memory and all the agonies of desire." --Chesterton, quoted by Borges in: Selected Non-Fictions ed. Eliot Weinwerger (1999)

Information is not a mass noun but a count noun. That fact by itself dooms the SuperInfoWay.

Since Americans despise the things they profess to respect--freedom, intelligence, & individuality--the only reason not to be a liar is martyrdom.

Someday it will be understood just as clearly that power & egotism should be kept apart, as kids & guns today.

"Evil" as the shadow cast by the hand of fear in the spotlight of despair.

Refusing to believe in chance is the most subtle, & perhaps the least pernicious, form of denial. But who is there can believe in neither chance nor necessity?

All the practitioners of unpopular arts are like Ed Wood: they have the greatest difficulty just getting people to first take them seriously.

Torture is a Rubicon. --saying of Asmodeus

For a bumpersticker: "GNOSTICS/ Know All the Pass Words."

Cities are the creation of slave societies & they continue to enslave us by the burden of their unquestioned demands.

It may not be strictly true, but it would be very helpful if it were generally believed that you cannot be a poet without reading poetry.

What if poetry readings were completely unscheduled & nobody ever knew when they would hear one again?