So I'm not going to do the whole quiz, because I'm 50% lazy and 50% working, but the first line amused the hell out of me.

Oh, btw, via syukton and thingstouchme.

ROCK STAR NAME: (first pet, current car): Mel Magnum

This is possibly the best answer I've been able to give, and perhaps even seen, since I first started seeing this quiz.

• 10:51 Today, California's highest court ruled that denying same-sex couples the right to marry is unconstitutional. Also, it's Bike to Work Day. #
• 11:13 Starving in the belly of a whale. #
• 11:35 Radio-guy Steve Erenberg's oddball collection (tools, motors, contraptions, models, &c) tinyurl.com/5wzsf6 #
• 11:37 Long stroll with the Grub early this morning before the temperature rose. We wore our matching sun hats. #
• 11:43 The Joy of Theoretical Non-Monogamy: tinyurl.com/6m4qwe #
• 15:24 I would love to be a fly on the wall during that @joedecker/@shoutingboy conversation. #
• 15:36 @colonelfairfax: I taught at one school that wouldn't let me access Latin sites because of the preposition 'cum.' #
• 15:41 @joedecker: You'd fill that stadium if you made out afterwards. ;) #
• 15:48 Orgasm requires shutdown of the brain’s center of vigilance in both sexes and neural power failure in females: tinyurl.com/55uja3 #
• 18:11 Kicking it old-school with the Grub. Also, cold beer. #
• 20:05 Going out to dinner with @tutordennis. I suppose I have to put on some pants. #
• 21:48 How creepy! Must go to the Musee Mecanique: www.museemechanique.org/ (recommended by @TheDoifter) #
• 21:49 Sushi downtown. Wasabi is very cooling. #
• 00:58 @caramida: My aim is true. #
• 01:06 Eccentric Genius, antiques from a parallel universe: eccentricgenius.ca/gallery.htm #
• 01:37 We fell asleep downstairs in front of the screen door. Upstairs now, no covers. It's still a wee bit warmish, even at 1:30A. #

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I thought I'd post a few pics from a photo shoot done in Brighton with the lovely  </a></b></a>gothindulgence  and model </a></b></a>official_bitch and myself (Queeny) for my business Queen of Hearts: Vintage Inspired Millinery.

We're relaunching today...  check out the website and enter the code LAUNCH16TH to get 15% off your order... offer expires at midnight on the 16th.

www.offwithherhead.co.uk

I interrupt my tales of Old Europe with a quick diversion to a Ladytron gig. Yep, after seeing 32 bands in Leipzig, the first thing I did when I got home was...go to a gig.

A lady, yesterday:



Not a great gig for Ladytron, alas. The power to the monitors failed about two thirds in, and the band had to leave the stage. I hung around a bit to see if they'd get things up and running again, but soon it was gone 10pm and nothing seemed to be happening. I saw from the running order on the mixing desk that the gig was scheduled to finish at 10.20 (yes, that early!) so I decided to cut my losses and go home. I don't know if the band was able to finish the gig: I doubt if they could've done more than two or three more songs at best.

Still, I got to see two of my fave Ladytron numbers, 'Blue Jeans' and 'Seventeen', so that was all right. The sound was good until the big brown-out, although I must say that for all their coolness Ladytron have the stage presence of a cardboard box.

Verdict: I'll give it five.

It seems to me that our understanding of what is living and what is dead is still a problem for us and bears some philosophical significance much like the hard problem of consciousness, so to speak.  In some ways, I think the question of how something inert and non-living can become imbued with life is quite akin to how matter can give rise to consciousness.  Perhaps it's possible that our language limits our understanding by leaving us with a nebulous concept such as "life," yet at the same time there is a sense in which we orient ourselves around and apprehend what is alive and what isn't.  We sort of "get it" when we see something living and something dead. It's not quite something which we can fully define with necessary and sufficient conditions.  Or at best, as in the field of biology, to employ a Searle-esque notion, we have a sufficient but vague set of descriptions which can hook onto a typological definition of life.  What is biotic is often considered to be functionally different from what is abiotic.  Even there, however, the question isn't settled.  It's rather unsettled actually. The definition of life is non-trivially problematic insofar as we can even imagine matter suddenly becoming alive from certain base proteins coded into gene-patterns within DNA and its various dynamic features of "information" exchange, and so forth.

Or perhaps the issue of life and non-life can become, speaking somewhat speculatively of course, a matter of degree -- that is, the qualitative leap from what is non-living in matter to what is living in a certain functional complexity is itself a matter of our wanting to categorically ascribe certain fixed boundaries for life and non-life.  But even that remains problematic because it raises the possibility that our understanding of matter in the cosmos through our mechanistic mode of thinking is wrong.  Perhaps we shouldn't be asking what is living and what is not, but whether anything can be non-living at all.  And the notion of an élan vital might seem more inviting. Up till the rise of mechanistic naturalism in modern science, there was a sense in which nature and the cosmos were living things (we can see this from the Greeks to the early moderns too).  In contrast to a sort of mechanistic naturalism, there was an organic naturalism of sorts.  Matter was not inert, passive and mechanistic in this sense, in contrast to the autopoietic features of living things; indeed, the difference between the allopoietic and the autopoietic was rather slim and notions of animus, psyche and pneuma were imbued within the notion of creaturely things.  The Pythagoreans, for instance, axiologically thought the sun the center of the universe because it was made of fire and fire was the most valuable and vital of things in the cosmos.

All this reminds me of something I've been reading about Heidegger's later work, with respect to his "The Origin of the Work of Art."  In this essay, Heidegger shows us that a significant and transformative communal work of art (such as a Greek temple) leaves us with a fundamental struggle between what he calls the "earth" and "world."  A world is merely the set of practices around which we focus our activities in a community and the ways in which we try and understand how our practices can be made explicit.  But the earth is that which resists being made explicit both in our worldliness and in our materiality.  And a significant art work presents us with this problem in such a manner that it orients the background of our world. The temple, for example, focused the community's efforts and sense of being in the world in such a way that it prescribed certain practices and attitudes, such as valor, strength, courage, misfortune, etc. and issued forth the worldliness of their demos.  Yet at the same time, it is no accident that the temple's material is made out of stone and not steel, reminding the community that there are certain features of their experience that are not entirely worldly but earthly and incapable of being fully dominated.  Not only that, but their own worldliness and cultural paradigms are presented  through the artwork with the same mystery that the earth has, leaving the background somewhat inexplicable. Such a significant art work prevents us from treating what is vital and living amongst us as dead, incapable of resistance.

Dreyfus gives us an analogy, via Kuhn, of a scientific paradigm where a certain novel work in the field revolutionizes the entire practice and makes all the micro-practices conform to the work that significantly resolves certain encountered anomalies. But once the paradigm is in force, there is no way of completely rationalizing the pure foundations and propositional beliefs that condition the practice. We can't break the paradigm down that way and even if we try the paradigm resists such explicit rationalization. Instead, the significant work and the paradigm it generates itself conditions the work -- there are no pure cognitive conditions, mere paradigmatic ones. But once the paradigm faces an anomaly, the paradigm breaks down as a sort of transcendental condition of scientific work and all the base assumptions once more emerge as problems to be cognitively tackled; once these anomalies are resolved, a new paradigm has to emerge to once more condition scientific practice. But even then, there is no guarantee at all of resolving all anomalies even if the scientific paradigm, unlike the Greek temple, conceals the struggle between the vital earth and the world of science. The anomaly once more awakens us to these tensions. 

The California Supreme Court overturned the state gay marriage ban! Yay!

http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-CA-GayMarriage.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin

• 09:44 Are you ready for the heat wave? #
• 11:09 Many happy returns of the day to @magna_maxima! #
• 11:14 The Edison Bar looks like an absolutely gorgeous venue. Would love to see it in person. tinyurl.com/6jd5ys #
• 16:17 Infant perception of color differs after language acquisition: tinyurl.com/4cvr4q #
• 16:42 Enchanting alphabet tiles: www.oddinq.com/alphabet.html #
• 17:48 Beautiful Nudibrach (sea slug) glam-shots:
  tinyurl.com/55xcnr #
• 17:53 Victorian/Edwardian "Curious Contraptions" slideshow: www.newscientist.com/data/images/ns/av/dn13875V1/dn13875.html #
• 20:20 Smoothie. #
• 20:50 My Short Steampunk Flogger made it into the Vintage and Steam Etsy Treasury: tinyurl.com/6z4sks #
• 23:19 Look, it's @vonslatt, @LibbyBulloff, @Datamancer and others in the Boston Phoenix: tinyurl.com/6pnb25 #
• 01:12 I wonder how many lentils I've eaten in my life? #

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Well, as I threatened earlier, here comes the first instalment of European Tour photos. Mostly trains, and things seen from trains, this time - so if that's not your bag, blip over this post and the rock 'n' roll will follow shortly.

Ici moi-même, sous la manche:



( Onward! )

maybe it's the over-stimulation/coffee talking (iced mocha! has espressoooooo!!!!), but I'm pretty much in love with everything right now.

Wir Sind Helden streaming into my headphones, Daft Punk streaming over the coffeeshop's speakers (dually appreciable actually), studying for my crypto by satisfyingly solving problems and building/memorizing a study sheet, thinking about a lovely friend and trading emails, and furthering my domination of the galaxies in Ogame.

I am everything right now, and it sounds like German, tastes like brie, and feels like fluffy comfy chairs.

This was me, about 24 hours ago. Self portrait in Inter-City Express window, Leipzig Hauptbahnhof:



This afternoon, I stepped off a train from Brussels at dear old London St. Pancras. Before that, I was on a train from Frankfurt. Before that, I was on a train from Leipzig. Before that, I was at the Wave Gotik Treffen. And before that, I was in Berlin.

I have tales to tell, I have people to thank, I have shout-outs and hat-tips to do. I also have the inevitable haul of photos to show you. But not just yet.

I've come home to the usual chaos. I have to wade through about four billion emails from people with comedy names offering me genuine fake Rolex watches, catch up with what all those new MySpacers want of me, then skim through a whole load of other people's WGT adventures just in case someone has said something like '...and then we saw Uncle N making a prat of himself after too many schwarzbiers'. Once I've got all that stuff sorted, I'll be able to add my own small noise to the racket of the interweb.

However, just to be going on with...here's a photo from Brussels, about 7 hours ago. Andi and Thomas debate Belgian geography:



And here's a very brief digest of the WGT. Off the top of my head I think I saw 32 bands (including the busking band and two Christian Deaths). The awards are as follows:

Best band of the lot: Psychic TV, who really were summoning spirits on Monday night.

Best new discovery: Militant Cheerleaders On The Move - and I only went to see them because they had a good name.

The coveted 'Well, that was a bit good, wasn't it!' award goes jointly to Spectra Paris and Noblesse Oblige, who can fight over it as they please.

Emilie Autumn gets a special mention for being really quite surprising - and revealing, dare I say it, hidden reserves of substance.

The 'Aaaarrrrgh! Get me out of here!' prize for provoking agony in my very soul goes to Signal Aout 42. My three songs in the photo pit were a teeth-clenchingly grim endurance test when they were on, but I stuck it out. Photographers' etiquette demands that no matter how ghastly the band might be, you're never the first to leave the pit!

I will leave you for now with this shot from Monday night - Genesis P-Orridge pointing at me. Fair gave me a funny turn, so it did:



More will follow, just as soon as my Real Life Re-Connection Procedures are complete...