Smart Energy

Get the straight dope on climate change from Real Climate, a blog by scientists who aren’t afraid of the so-called “liberal” media (right-wing monkey boys, all of ‘em) and the American oligarchy called democratic politics. Get a great intro to the Real Climate blog and the state of climate change science and politics by reading this interview over at Daily Kos.

In the Miso Soup

review by Brian Charles Clark

In the Miso Soup
Ryo Murakami
Penguin, 2006

The common element among miso soup, blood, and semen is the taste of salt. All three share the qualities of the wet and the sticky—and the sexual connotations of wet, sticky blood and semen are the dark ingredients in the “soup” of Ryu Murakami’s thriller. Murakami is no stranger to the dark side: Coin Locker Babies is cyberpunk for grownups that makes the efforts of Gibson and Sterling come off as the work of pampered babies, while the Burroughsian fever of the semi-autobiographical Almost Transparent Blue brutally yanks the chain of anyone who remembers the Seventies (the few that do) as boring.

In the Miso Soup is the stuff of nightmares, but its narrator, just-turned-twenty Kenji, is matter-of-fact. Kenji is a guide for foreign tourists to Tokyo’s sex trade, from the fetishistic to the unfettered by a longing for feet or fists. He’s just trying to make a living, so when the overweight American Frank contracts with him for a few nights’ worth of directions and interpretation, Kenji shakes off his feeling of dread and shows Frank around. Read the rest of this entry »

Enjoy a crunchy potato chip bar -- it's from the future!

Still waiting for the City of the Future? Look no further! In 1961 the American Potato Journal published this photo of the food of the future: the potato-chip bar! Get a dose of salt and starch to fuel the jetpack-powered business of you day.

“The potato chip bar is made by crushing chips and molding them by pressure into a shape and size resembling a candy bar. Such bars can be shipped economically without the protective packaging normally required for potato chips, and their flavor and crunchy texture give them distinct possibilities for commercialization” (Am Potato J 38:10 [1961] 340).

Dirt road through a forest

“Dirt Road” is probably my favorite of the many songs Cotton and I wrote together. It’s folk rap. Cotton based the lyrics on the old Robert Johnson “Crossroads” legend: a guy goes down to the crossroads, meets the devil, and sells his soul for talent. Like everything we wrote and recorded together, this was done on desktop equipment. The guitar I’m playing is Cotton’s beat, no-name acoustic with a cheap pick-up. Cotton blew some harmonica riffs. When we released this tune it got a lot of airplay on KUOI, Moscow, Idaho, thanks to a couple DJs there. The image for this post is by M. O. Hammond and is called “Dirt road through a forest,” 1896.