The Wheel of Time is done At 2:45pm Sunday, Robert Jordan (James Oliver Rigney, Jr.) died. He was 58 years old. … Deaths sucks.

An interesting story here. Let us go back to the ancient time of the 2005 fall season. A drama called Quarterlife was pitched to ABC and they decided they weren’t interested in a show about a group of recent graduates in Chicago. The show creators Marshall Herskovitz and Ed Zwick, unaware of the definition of the rarely heard word “No” decided to continue working on their series. They have an hours worth of show already and plan to cut it into six or seven episodes (roughly eight and half minutes an episode, much like Sanctuary) and release thirty-six episodes. They will be airing for 24 hours on MySpace before shifting to their permanent home of the show’s website. The production will be funded by embedded ads within the show. All in all, a great move. *hate* Network TV. However, I don’t particularly like *streaming* TV that much either … still, anything not on a network which will axe it for not good reason is a step in the right direction.

For your reading pleasure, an interesting blog post on Oh Henry’s “Oh Canada” bar … and the Chocolate Bar industry in general. Enjoy the chewy, gooey insides.

1 million dollars!!!!!

Seriously… I now know how to turn the moon into “The Death Star.” It was recently discovered that when you target ordinary salt water (ala the oceans), with a specific radio frequency, the water will “catch fire”. The water itself doesn’t burn, but the radio frequency seems to disrupt the hydrogen bonds in the water and the hydrogen then burns with exposure to the radio frequency. Neat, huh?

“They’re headed to that small moon”
“That’s no moon”

Turn the moon into a giant emitter for this frequency and viola… Death Star!

Interesting little bit of news. It appears that DualCor Technologies is suing Intel over the use of the words “Dual” and “Core”, used in conjunction to describe their Core Duo processors. The problem I have with this is that the phrase “dual core” is an industry term, not limited to Intel at all. It is a description. Dual - meaning two - Core. It is like Quad Core. Hmmm … if they win, remind me to found a company and register the trademark “OctalCor” and sue Intel and AMD when they release their 8 core processors. Is this a new business model? My company isn’t making money. Boo-Hoo. I can’t afford to play my employees. Wa-ha. I’m going to sue someone because I failed … I call this the SCO approach to revenue generation.

Books like Jennifer Government and Infinite Jest paint a future where corporations have run amok in a “paradise of perverted capitalism”. Not only is culture up for sale, but so are names of people and years (The Year of Glad, Jennifer Matel, usw are just a few minor examples) and lives (killing random people to drive up shoe sales for Nike). The governments are bankrupt and no longer able to keep the corporations in check, and must turn to the very corporations that eviscerated the government to keep essential services flowing, which just makes matters worse. However, these scenarios are all fiction and would never happen … right?

The above video is real and may be an indicator of things to come. In the past, corporations purchased songs to use in their commercials, but this song, by the band Pop4Real crosses the line. It is a love song for Nokia new N81 cell phone. The key question is if Nokia paid for it or if it was produced as a joke. Either way, it is as frightening as it is generic and catchy. Not frightening for what it is, but what it may represent.

But all of that is minor. This article on war profiteers in Iraq paints of picture of where the USA is heading, at least in the opinion of the article’s authour. The following excerpt from the 8-page horror story on the Iraq War Profiteers:

Operation Iraqi Freedom, it turns out, … was an invasion of the federal budget, and no occupying force in history has ever been this efficient. George W. Bush’s war in the Mesopotamian desert was an experiment of sorts, a crude first take at his vision of a fully privatized American government. In Iraq the lines between essential government services and for-profit enterprises have been blurred to the point of absurdity — to the point where wounded soldiers have to pay retail prices for fresh underwear, where modern-day chattel are imported from the Third World at slave wages to peel the potatoes we once assigned to grunts in KP, where private companies are guaranteed huge profits no matter how badly they fuck things up.

And just maybe, reviewing this appalling history of invoicing orgies and million-dollar boondoggles, it’s not so far-fetched to think that this is the way someone up there would like things run all over — not just in Iraq but in Iowa, too, with the state police working for Corrections Corporation of America, and DHL with the contract to deliver every Christmas card. And why not? What the Bush administration has created in Iraq is a sort of paradise of perverted capitalism, where revenues are forcibly extracted from the customer by the state, and obscene profits are handed out not by the market but by an unaccountable government bureaucracy. This is the triumphant culmination of two centuries of flawed white-people thinking, a preposterous mix of authoritarian socialism and laissez-faire profiteering, with all the worst aspects of both ideologies rolled up into one pointless, supremely idiotic military adventure — American men and women dying by the thousands, so that Karl Marx and Adam Smith can blow each other in a Middle Eastern glory hole.

It was an awful idea, perhaps the worst America has ever tried on foreign soil. But if you were in on it, it was great work while it lasted.

The whole description is frightening close to both the worlds of Jennifer Government and Infinite Jest for comfort. Add for further consideration, consider the current state of security in the US itself. Historically economically protectionist, they have now made every foreigner entering their country feel like a criminal. In the words of Max Berry (authour of Jennifer Government):

One thing I’m looking forward to is discovering what wacky new security schemes US Customs has come up with since I last visited. In 2006 they’d added fingerprinting and digital mug shots. This time I’m thinking maybe they’ll swab my mouth or get me to sing the Pledge of Allegiance. Or maybe they have followed this route to its logical conclusion and now herd foreign visitors straight from the airport to prisons, where any of us not intending to commit terrorist atrocities can fill out applications to be released.

While perhaps a bit cynical, it is probably coming … brought to you by Lockheed & Martin.

Read this bash quote. It is really rather amusing.