my world is round

Dr. Sketchy: The Ninja

The ninja crouched in anticipation. Of what, he did not know. His job was to be ready. For anything.

His eyes blazed a trail across the room leaving a ring of smoke in its wake. Years of guerrilla training let him search for danger without moving a fiber in any one of his well-sculpted muscles. A woman in a virginal white dress broke through the smoky haze and stared at him with open lust. The succulent flower above her ear promised more coral flowers to come. She licked her ripe, pouty lips slowly, the sweat beading on her dainty brow. Later he thought. He had a job to finish first. If the dame was still there when he was done, he’d take her home and pluck the petals off that flower one by one.

Two heavy guys to her left. They could have been thugs but for the bulky sketch tablets they balanced on their sizable laps.  Sketching in earnest, their faces were soft and pliable, eager to capture the testosterone that dripped off his body.

Without warning, the ninja flipped through the air, performing a human acrobatic maneuver seemingly impossible on the tiny stage. The small crowd let out a collective gasp as he twisted and turned, his muscles rippling in the late afternoon sunlight that thrust through dirty windows. All at once, he was still. A new pose for them. A new view of the room for him.

His eyes landed on another woman. Also dressed in white. The purity in the room was stifling. She looked up from her sketch pad just as he started to look away. And stopped him in his tracks. The cold flat look in those eyes told a story.  A lifetime of hard knocks. The white dress for her was a shield, a ruse. There was nothing pure about her.

He watched the careful strokes on her charcoal pencil, each mark correlating with a fingernail scratch down his back. Three nights of burning passion had left battle scars on his body and soul. His eyes glazed over for a split second, remembering the feel of her tight body astride his own. Almost a fatal mistake. Rule number one - Never let down your defenses.

He saw the gun before it cleared the table. The weak sunlight his ally as it glinted off the cold metal barrel. Two catlike leaps and a round kick had the Colt skittering across the floor and his elbow an iron vise on her slender neck. The tender hollow that he had kissed just last night. She looked at him, unflinching. Daring him. Wanting him. What a pair they would make, these two.

A snap of his powerful wrist and her neck cracked in two. A lone gasp from the room. The other woman in white. The rest of crowd settled in quiet anticipation. They knew the score.

The ninja twisted through an ancient warrior routine to clear his mind. Then assumed a tight crouch on the platform. His eyes burned into the woman with the flower until a small groan escaped her lips. Another pose today. Another dame tonight.

Dr. Sketchy Houston

rats in a maze

What if after you died, the answers to the universe were revealed? The meaning of life was explained. Why are we here? What is our purpose? What if the answer was disturbing - or worse, mundane, or inconsequential?

Went to see David Eagleman speak on Tuesday night, a young, good-looking Renaissance man, a neuroscientist with a love for literature who has written a philosophical book on human nature. His book, Sum, (which btw he had a really good reason for the title. Sum from the Latin word Summa meaning The Highest. And I think sum as in the sum is greater than the whole of the parts. Not sure on the latter, maybe that was what I was expecting him to say but I think he came up with something better. You know those intellectuals.) is a collection of forty very short vignettes, that explore what we might find waiting for us after our time here is done. Not so much a look into the afterlife and what we can expect but more of a reflection on what is happening here, now, and how we respond to both life’s predictable and its unexplained turn of events.

My favorite one so far, am not quite halfway through the book, is one about a man who dies and after reflecting on his life of deadlines, traffic and financial pressures, decides to return to earth as a simpler creature, a horse. And as the transformation progresses, he realizes that after he loses the memories of his trials and stresses, he will not be able to appreciate his simpler life. The sense of peace and serenity will be the norm. And in his next spin through the world, he will return as a creature simpler than a horse until he no longer returns at all.

Deep stuff.

Dr. Sketchy

She posed seductively on the worn, wooden platform at the front of the room, her bare skin painted golden by the warm afternoon sun. Blond hair cascaded down her back in thick voluptuous waves, pounds of golden silk a man could get lost in for days. Bright red lipstick cut a thick gash across her alabaster face, her mouth firmly set, sending a clear Fuck Off message to me and the rest of the world. Her icy blue eyes pierced my soul with a ferocity that would stop a charging rhino. She looked away, slowly, bored. She was as cool as she was hot.

I dragged a bettered chair as close to the stage as I could get. I had told myself on the way up that dark, narrow staircase that I would resist her charms. But this dame had an animal magnetism that drew me to her like a beggar to a feast. I was enchanted. Her eyes flicked over me again, her perfectly plump lip turning up with a delicate sneer. My heart raced, pounding out a calypso rhythm against my ribs. She would be a challenge. No question. But this was a game I was wiling to play. Win or lose. Both were the same to me.

She switched poses, the feline muscles beneath her skin rippling in the dim light as she tipped her Fedora with the muzzle of her piece. It was a small gun, petite and feminine. Oozing sexuality. Just like her. I inched closer, leaning forward to taste her breath as it escaped her lips.

She looked at me then, her eyes like tiny daggers, sharp, dangerous. A smile curled on her lips as she lured me in. I was putty in her hands and she knew it. She leaned toward me, her large, firm breasts bulging against the lace of her bodice. Sweat broke out on my top lip. I relished the salty flavor, imagining the sensual taste of her in my mouth.

Her lips parted seductively as she lifted her arm, the pistol making a slow evocative rise from her side until it pointed straight at me. I couldn’t keep my eyes from that mouth, those lips, as her fingers curled around the trigger. I knew the shot was meant for me. But I didn’t care. I was lost, drowning in the promise of her body.

The shot knocked me back in the chair, a crimson stain spreading slowly across my chest. And still I couldn’t turn away. She lifted the barrel to her mouth and gently blew away a wisp of smoke, a last act of kindness, a final memory that I could carry with me into the darkness.

Dr. Sketchy Houston

Music in nature

Saw the coolest thing Wednesday night at the Artist Saloon. Nick Bontrager, a local artist, has developed software that lays the movement of animals atop a musical grid. As the creatures, in this case - mice, ran about the surface, their movements generated strings of musical notes. Cleverly built, you can change the scale key, length and instrument sound with a touch of a button. Brilliant programming. Brilliant idea. You can see the footage on his blog.

I spoke with Nick briefly after his demonstration and he asked me what I liked best about it. Had to think on that one a sec - was I more intrigued by the complexity of the program or ingenuity of the project? I think in the end it is all about the music.

I think that the natural world has so much to offer artistically. Sunsets contain the most vivid colors. Animals with their silky fur or sleek and shiny skin. The sense of awe you feel in a violent thunderstorm. It seems only fitting that the natural movement of our creatures, when played out in multiple dimensions, creates a beauty all its own. The music from those little mice sounded like the tinkling of an old-fashioned jewelry box. Simply beautiful.

What is WRONG with these people?

A Saudi woman is gang-raped. The rapists receive punishment, but the victim receives punishment, too -- for being outside her home without a male relative. When her attorney argues that the rapists need harsher sentences, the victim's punishment is increased. How does this happen??

From a CNN article: http://www.cnn.com/2007/WORLD/meast/11/17/saudi.rape.victim/index.html

(CNN) -- A court in Saudi Arabia increased the punishment for a gang-rape victim after her lawyer won an appeal of the sentence for the rapists, the lawyer told CNN.

The 19-year-old victim was sentenced last year to 90 lashes for meeting with an unrelated male, a former friend from whom she was retrieving photographs. The seven rapists, who abducted the pair and raped both, received sentences ranging from 10 months to five years in prison.

The victim's attorney, Abdulrahman al-Lahim, contested the rapists' sentence, contending there is a fatwa, or edict under Islamic law, that considers such crimes Hiraba (sinful violent crime) and the punishment should be death.

"After a year, the preliminary court changed the punishment and made it two to nine years for the defendants," al-Lahim said of the new decision handed down Wednesday. "However, we were shocked that they also changed the victim's sentence to be six months in prison and 200 lashes."

The judges more than doubled the punishment for the victim because of "her attempt to aggravate and influence the judiciary through the media," according to a source quoted by Arab News, an English-language Middle Eastern daily newspaper.

The watchdog

Whenever Rose was in the shower, the dog started to bark.

Not the random bored bark to see if any other dogs were lying around with nothing better to do. Not the I want to eat that squirrel whiny bark that Rose found so irritating. But more of the there is someone too close to my house and it is making me uncomfortable bark. And every time, her heart stopped for a fraction of a second.

Today would be different from the previous days. Today she would not clutch a towel to her wet, naked body and creep out to the den only to find her dog grinning stupidly at her. Today she would leave that trail of water droplets all the way to the front door and find a large man entering her house. Today she would confront a stranger with nothing but evil in his heart. Today she would die while the dog watched, barking from a safe distance.

Rose grabbed her towel from the hook and draped it loosely around her. The dog was barking more frantically now. She breathed in the hot, steamy air from the shower, then slowly twisted the knob. Her heart was hammering in her chest. She left her wet footprints behind as she made her way down the hall and around the corner. The dog let out a little whine. She had no weapon to fight with. No phone to call the police. Not even a shred of clothing to protect her body.

She couldn't hear the dog now. Was it injured? Dead? She turned into the den, noticed the doors were closed, the windows intact. The dog smiled at her and laid down to nap on the stairs.

Damn dog.

Waiting at the station

She was waiting at the station, wearing her best pink dress. Her hair was coiffed neatly and tucked into a tiny pillbox hat with a lacy black veil. She wore clean white gloves on her hands and a pair of sensible black pumps on her feet. She was ready. She had spent years getting ready for this day.

She checked her watch again and stretched out over the rail, peering down the track that ran to the horizon. She had family waiting for her. There was somewhere else she was needed. She had arrived here to do a job. And through years of love and laughter, tears and sorrow, she had persevered until her work was done. Now she was tired. She was ready to go home.

She sat down primly on her suitcase and waited.

wu wei - action without action

Tao theory includes the concept of wu wei, acting without acting. Roughly meaning that when one is in complete harmony with nature, no specific action is needed because the very act of being causes the necessary things to happen without effort.

In the original Taoist texts, wu wei is often associated with water and its yielding nature. Although water is soft and weak, it has the capacity to erode even solid stone (see Grand Canyon) and move mountains (see landslides). Water is without will (i.e., the will for a shape), though it can be understood to be opposing wood, stone, or any solid material that can be broken into pieces. It can fill any container, take any shape, go anywhere, even into the smallest holes. When falling as rain in thousands of small drops, water still has the capacity to reunite as it eventually joins the endless seas.

From the wu wei Wikipedia entry.

ursula leguin strikes back

A hilarious slap in the face from the legendary Ursula LeGuin on one magazine's pompous position that genre fiction is crap.

Ursula LeGuin rips into Slate Magazine

the paper e-book

Did anyone attend the first O'Reilly TOC (Tools of Change) for Publishing conference last month? Lots of great stuff about where the publishing industry is headed with regard to changes in technology. Print on demand, publishing online, gadgets, marketing -- they really ran the gamut on what is now available, and more importantly, what needs to be considered going forward.

One thing that caught my eye while reading through the TOC conference blogs (I was attending a local conference that weekend) was the paper e-book. This technology combines the printed page with the online convenience of related links. Reading something of interest and want to know more about a particular item? Need a dictionary reference for an obscure word? Just tap with your finger!

Manolis Kelaidis, a designer at the Royal College of Art in London, has found a way to make printed pages digitally interactive. His "blueBook" prototype is a paper book with circuits embedded in each page and with text printed with conductive ink. When you touch a "linked" word on the page and your finger completes a circuit, sending a signal to a processor in the back cover which communicates by Bluetooth with a nearby computer, bringing up information on the screen. (image from booktwo.org)

Cool stuff for fiction works - imagine having this technology while reading the Da Vinci Code. More importantly, this feature would exponentially expand the scope of non-fiction books. And consider the educational ramifications. You could read Catcher in the Rye during high school English and conduct all your research directly from the book.

Fascinating.