I’m sure most people know about Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies — a deck of cards with gnomic suggestions to consult at random during creative work.

I propose my own, new deck, informed by my jaundiced world view, and in no small part, my own failings as a human being.

1. Cultivate the disreputable
2. Lie gratuitously
3. Argue extravagantly over minutiae
4. Blame the innocent
5. Solve the wrong problem
6. Construct the trivial sturdy, the crucial shoddy
7. Give misleading directions
8. Damn with faint praise
9. Make a virtue of waste, a vice of thrift
10. Play dumb
11. Make incorrect change
12. Celebrate incompetence
13. Value syntax over meaning
14. Imagine things to complain about
15. Leave out the important part
16. Flatter the deluded
17. Argue with those who agree with you
18. Subvert while appearing to cooperate
19. Niggle, always
20. Curse the virtuous
21. Speak authoritatively when ignorant
22. Say the opposite
23. Laugh hardest at the unfunny
24. Meet sincerity with sarcasm
25. Hold grudges
26. Complain operatically
27. Suspect every kindness
28. Swamp any straightforward motive with ulterior ones
29. Purport falsely
30. Implacably oppose the reasonable
31. Deliver less than you promise
32. Ridicule caution
33. Value yourself negatively, others less
34. No such thing as excessively literal
35. Prevaricate, Obfuscate, Denigrate
36. Puncture someone’s good mood
37. Pursue empty ambitions relentlessly
38. Exasperated sighs, sour grimaces
39. Let people try to drag you with them
40. Whenever possible, disappoint
41. Deny the problem
42. Smirk at people’s misfortune
43. Boast without justification
44. Give up early
45. Assign everyone else sinister motives
46. Squander the irreplaceable
47. Disturb the tranquil
48. Afflict the unfortunate
49. Cut in line
50. Waste everyone’s time
51. Take no stand
52. No pity, ever
53. Profit from misfortune

This headline definitely rubbed me the wrong way. I’m all for small-’s’ socialism where appropriate — health care, education, social security, appropriately modest defense — but I’m having a hard time imagining many people who would receive a University-wide e-mail who could credibly complain of being oppressed. Sure, there’s racism, sexism, and the erosions of personal freedoms in the US, but when I think of oppression, I think of having your home bulldozed, or being kept naked in a cell with a bag over your head and receiving daily beatings.

There’s hardly a more privileged group of people on the planet than the faculty, staff, and students of the University of Iowa. We worry more about cell phone reception & the price of Lattes than we do about actual oppression.

Will the U of I Socialists do anything useful to liberate the oppressed of the world? If they actually do something that in some small way comforts the afflicted or afflicts the comfortable, more power to ‘em. But somehow I don’t imagine they can do much beyond holding weekly meetings.

This will be my last post on the subject. It’s been fun to get a lot more site visits, but just for perspective, my friend Jerry’s Retarded Ravers Of America site was getting ten times the traffic ten years ago that my blog does today. It also feels a little weird riding Justin Bieber’s coat tails to this new level of web notoriety. As it happens the PaulStretch OS X posts consistently generate more traffic than anything else on this blog, which puts me in my place–doing a port of PaulStretch may be my most enduring Internet legacy, even if I wish I was known more for my own music.

Anyway, as regards the “Love U” stretched version, there was some speculation that it was a hoax, and then some speculation that the ‘group’ claiming they’d made the track themselves was itself a hoax. I decided to investigate, and came to these conclusions:

• It was, in fact, produced using PaulStretch, perhaps even using my OS X port
• The actual slowdown was actually on the order of 10x
• It was pitched down a little more than a half-step.
• Either it was MP3 encoded at a low quality/bitrate, or slightly lowpass filtered. My version (which is encoded from the raw output of PaulStretch) sounds noticeably brighter.

Download audio file (JB-USmile-Stretched.mp3)
http://www.cornwarning.com/xfer/JB-USmile-Stretched.mp3

The original:
J. BIEBZ – U SMILE 800% SLOWER by Shamantis

I give you Stefaniya

I drew a book for my niece Lucy for Christmas 2007, based on an anecdote from her mother Tessa: Tessa was in a bookstore in Park Slope Brooklyn with my niece Lucy, who was two and a half years old. Lucy tells Tessa “Mommy, let me read to you!” So Tessa sits down with Lucy, Lucy holding a random book. Lucy began to read with the title “American States In The Thirties and Forties.”

So I decided to write that book, and fill it with as many lies and as much misinformation as I could muster.

Today I took all the scanned images and stuck them together in Word and made a PDF file out of them, the better to print out or browse through on a computer.

http://www.cornwarning.com/xfer/AmericanStates.pdf

Lucy's Favorite Page

It’s still available as individual images on Flickr.com.

My niece Lucy began taking music lessons. This is her first attempt at manuscript. And since she put in more intentionality than, for example, goldfish swimming or birds on telephone wires, I thought it deserved to be arranged.
Download audio file (LucysTheme.mp3)

We all knew he was a person of color…

Barack, colorized

There is so much that is unintentionally humorous about this video. Is Roland incapable of finding a proper tone in their promotional materials? This is the video equivalent of the hilarious manuals that came with Roland gear in the 80s. “We will also provide you with some other related information!”

TWatkins mentioned this on twitter and it’s amazing: Take A Weird Break — a compendium of headlines from the Take A Break magazine published in the UK. Take A Break is a concept so brilliant that it must be replicated here in the US: It’s a tabloid whose stories come largely from reader submissions. So they have every nutter in the UK trying to top each other for salacious weirdness.

A state representative wants to rewrite the legal description of Iowa’s state seal so that it no longer includes a reference of a citizen soldier “with a plow in his rear.”

From Boing Boing

We’re really talking Meta here: The audience who’d instantly get this joke would be anyone who works in the Web Ghetto, and old-school nerds like myself. But consider this: this joke wouldn’t exist 30 years ago. Comic Sans was invented in 1994 and I’m not sure when the Comic Sans backlash started. Helvetica was born in 1957 — it’s the same age I am! But Helvetica as a signifier to the common folk dates back only to 2007 when the Helvetica movie came out.

So long as we’re deconstructing — consider the black guy in this picture. In the age of Obama, the slim, light-skinned black man is a signifier. It says ‘hipper than standard issue white guy, but not all ghetto.’ Would they ever try and sell a shirt like this with a scowling black man in a Sox cap rocking a 5XL? I think not*

*and yes go ahead and call me racist, but I see black men rocking this look every day at the bus stop.

Bless redacted’s bureaucratic little heart. I’m sure it’s all very important to the business of the hospital, but I can only hear this e-mail in John Cleese’ voice when I read it.

I like how Lady Gaga skipped a lot of steps in recapitulating Madonna’s Career, jumping straight to Madge’s ‘Sex’ and ‘Blond Ambition’ period.

This was at the top of an e-mail from a University of Iowa office. The mail had nothing to do with penguins, top hats and monocles, penguins wearing top hats and monocles, or Lyndon Baines Johnson. It is surreal and random in a way that can’t possibly be intentionally surreal and random. The people that write e-mail newsletters at the University of Iowa are way too earnest for those sorts of hijinks.

From Black Dog Flickr Feed

Man just wants delicious burrito, gets accused of being a zombie, has nose broken.

Iowa City is home of the Zombified “Resist Evil” Zombie Movie trilogy, an annual Zombie Parade (which benefits charity), and now, a guy who apparently imagines himself a zombie fighter.

Dude fucked up — Zombies eat brains, not burritos.

I cut my finger cooking last night, and apparently found a nice juicy vein in the process. I was in the middle of something time critical, so when I couldn’t find a band-aid, I did the ol scotch tape + paper towel approximation* and went back to what I was doing until I could reach a good stopping point.

At said stopping point, I looked at my finger, and then the floor, and apparently unbeknownst to me, I’d been bleeding profusely, and there was blood all over the kitchen floor, counter & spattered down my pant leg. At that point, I changed pants and ran to the grocery store for some proper band-aids. Once I got enough pressure on it to stop the bleeding** I mopped up. The place looked like I’d slaughtered a goat, though I couldn’t have lost more than an ounce or so of blood.

*Way back when i worked construction, I worked with a guy who would bind up wounds with any semi-clean absorbent material and duct tape. This works surprisingly well, better sometimes than band-aids or gauze+tape dressings. I suppose it’s preferable to use sterile dressings, but in the real world, a reasonably healthy individual will rarely get an infection in a cut allowed to bleed freely for a few seconds, and then bound tight enough to slow the bleeding down to an ooze. That’s why your blood is at a positive pressure gradient with respect to the outside world — so it comes out instead of letting germs in.

**I have to have a pretty bad cut to consider stitches, having wasted my time and money a couple times with ER visits. If you can stop the bleeding and you can’t see bone, carefully applied clean dressings usually do just as well. My last ER visit about a cut involved a broken olive oil bottle and looked like an improvised mouth 3 inches wide. I drove myself to the hospital with my right hand wrapped in a bloody towel. Good times.

We wanted to ship a package to my son in India, where he’s doing a term abroad. Amazon says, “sure no problem, it can be there for his birthday, that will be $50.”

It didn’t arrive, and this was my entry into what seems to an American the surreal world of India. Let me enumerate.

1. Where he’s living, there are no street names, or street numbers. You send your mail to a particular post office in a city, and from there it’s identified just by the family name. So apparently mailmen (and DHL couriers) are good when they know the names of everyone and where they live, and fucking useless otherwise.

2. I called DHL and she said she’d contact the DHL office where the package is supposed to be delivered. She also gave me a local number for DHL. But phone #s in India are 10 digits — usually — and she only gave me an 8 digit number, with no indication of a city code. Given that the number of phones in India won’t fit in 8 digits, I don’t have high hopes that it will be very useful. Not only that I can go to the DHL India’s web site and it gives different numbers.

3. In a web-based sort of insanity, on the DHL page, the image where the phone #s are isn’t actually a normal image — it’s a flash application. And until you right click and zoom in, the text below the phone numbers is illegible.