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Are you a Republican? Libertarian (ha-ha!)? Did you feel emasculated after Obama won? Maybe you feel a little less virile, a little less of a man?

As it turns out, you are!

The present study investigated voters’ testosterone responses to the outcome of the 2008 United States Presidential election. 183 participants provided multiple saliva samples before and after the winner was announced on Election Night. The results show that male Barack Obama voters (winners) had stable post-outcome testosterone levels, whereas testosterone levels dropped in male John McCain and Robert Barr voters (losers).

Wired has an oversimplified assessment of the study’s results, but the findings are clear:

Male voters exhibit biological responses to the realignment of a country’s dominance hierarchy as if they participated in an interpersonal dominance contest. [...] Moreover, since the dominance hierarchy shift following a presidential election is stable for 4 years, the stress of having one’s political party lose control of executive policy decisions could plausibly lead to continued testosterone suppression in males.

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Gothtronic reviews A Bright Cut Across Velvet Sky:

Ad·ver·sary is the powernoise/IDM project of Jairus Khan. In 2008 he made quite a name for himself with his album ‘Bone Music’, which was available as regular cd edition on Tympanik Audio, but could also be downloaded for free in high quality. [...] A very good remix album. Although some songs get remixed three times, all the tracks have a reasonable different sound, so it doesn’t get repetitive. Together with the addition of a couple of new tracks this is really an album you should have in you collection!

I agree with this man! You should download the album (it’s free!), or pick up a CD (on sale now!) from Tympanik.

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Today I made this for a presentation:

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This is a list of near-mint records that my boss just gave me:

• Bauhaus – Bela Lugosi’s Dead (!), 1979-1983, The Sky’s Gone Out
• Blondie – Autoamerican
• Gang of Four – Entertainment!, I Love A Man in a Uniform, Solid Gold, The Yellow EP
• Joy Division – Atmosphere, Closer, Substance
• Love and Rockets – Ball of Confusion, Express, Love and Rockets, Seventh Dream of Teenage Heaven
• Minor Threat – Out of Step
• Mojo Nixon & Skid Roper – Root Hog Or Die
• New Order – State of the Nation, Subculture, Substance, Technique, The Perfect Kiss
• Pere Ubu – The Tenement Year
• Public Image Ltd. – Album
• Simple Minds – Sister Feelings Call
• Siouxsie and The Banshees – Cities in Dust
• Skids – Days in Europa
• Squeeze – Babylon and on
• Talk Talk – It’s My Life
• Talking Heads – Wild Wild Life
• The B-52s – The B-52s
• The Cure – Boys Don’t Cry, Concert (Live), Standing on a Beach
• The Jesus and Mary Chain – Automatic, Darklands
• The March Violets – Walk Into The Sun
• The Mission – Carved in sand
• The Screaming Blue Messiahs – Gun-Shy
• The Sugar Cubes – Life’s Too Good
• NME C86

(They were sitting in a milk crate on my chair when I got in this morning!)

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On this first day of the Octomonth (birthstone: opal; flower: calendula), I would like to introduce you to Hedy Lamarr, the first (of many) BADASS OF THE MONTH(s):

“Any girl can be glamorous. All she has to do is stand still and look stupid.”

Hedy was a successful actress as a young teenager, but her big breaththrough came in the controversial Bohemian (as in, from Bohemia) film, Ecstasy. It was 1933, and people were excited and outraged about a skinny dipping scene; the most outstanding thing about this movie, however, is that it was the first studio film to have a sex scene in it — and the first to depict a female orgasm.

The movie is special not just for its prurient content (and it should be said, the camera never leaves the actors’ faces when things get heavy), but for being an powerful study of a young woman’s sexual empowerment. It was released a year before the Hays Code crackdown began, and so there’s no moral play at work. No virgin/whore complex to feed, no pretense that women live identically sexless lives, who only acquiesce to their husbands after shopping trips (while thinking about their kitchen duties the entire time).

After Ecstasy’s release, Hedy married an controlling Austro-fascist arms manufacturer thirty years her senior who forbade her from making movies. He would take her with him to his business meetings (where military technology and highly technical problems were debated), and force her to entertain at his parties (which Mussolini often attended).

In 1937, after having enough of his crap (and after being forced by her husband to sleep with Hitler to get an arms contract), Hedy dressed up for a ‘party’, drugged her husband, and left Austria (with all of her magnificently expensive jewelry).

Over the next 10 years she made close to twenty films, had two children, and developed a backstage reputation as a voracious bisexual (second only to her sometimes-lover, Marlon Brando). In her time, she was reportedly involved with Frank Sinatra, Clark Gable, Jimmy Stewart, Johnny Carson, Howard Huges, Errol Flynn, JFK, and even Charlie Chaplin.

“I don’t think that anyone would call me a lesbian, it’s just that I seem to be the type that other women get queer ideas about.”

More importantly, however, she also did this.

U.S. Patent #2292387

That is the design drawing for her 1942 invention of Frequency Hopping Spread Spectrum communication, upon which all WiFi, CDMA cell networks, and countless other technologies rely. It went like this: Radio controlled torpedoes are more accurate than ‘dumb’ torpedoes, but it’s easy to jam the frequency that the torpedo control channel is on. By rapidly changing the frequency that the control channel was transmitted on, you prevent the adversary from jamming your signals.

Working with experimental composer George Anthiel (who once composed a symphony that required 16 player pianos), she placed a modified piano roll in the torpedo and the controller plane, allowing them to switch frequencies in sync with each other. Unfortunately, it was nearly two decades later before her the importance and potential of her invention was realized. The Navy of the time did not take seriously a device invented by a woman that ran on musical equipment, and suggested to Hedy that she could best support the war effort elsewhere. She did, once raising $7,000,000 in a single event where she sold kisses for fifty grand each. (When honored by the EFF in 1997 for her contribution of spread spectrum technology, she was quoted as saying “It’s about time.”)

Her later years were noteworthy for her lavish parties, five husbands, two shoplifting arrests, a star on Hollywood’s walk of fame, and a Boeing recruitment ad featuring her as a woman of science, with no mention of her film career.

So, here’s to you, Hedy Lamarr. You kicked ass, you took names, you did what you wanted, who you wanted, when you wanted, and you changed the world.

“Jack Kennedy always said to me, Hedy, get involved. That’s the secret of life. Try everything. Join everything. Meet everybody. “

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Red Dust: Photos from the Sydney dust storm.

Opera House, NSW Maritime

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Ten years ago today, I waited outside HMV for it to open in the morning so I could pick up a copy of The Fragile at the very moment it was released.

Ten years later, I’m cursing ebay regularly trying to find a non-bootleg vinyl copy for less than $100.

This lot is what dreams are made of.

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Norman Borlaug, “the plant scientist who did more than anyone else in the 20th century to teach the world to feed itself,” has died at age 95. On the staff of the Rockefeller Foundation in Mexico, Borlaug “developed a “miracle wheat” that tripled grain output and moved the country to self-sufficiency. Dr. Borlaug then took his high-yield, disease-resistant wheat to Pakistan and India, averting the mass famine and starvation that had been widely predicted.”

Yet, despite his achievement, and being one of only five people to have won the Nobel Peace Prize, the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Congressional Gold Medal, Borlaug was hardly a household name: a 1997 Atlantic profile described him as the “forgotten benefactor of humanity.”

(Post by NotMyselfRightNow, via MeFi.)

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(One of) my therapist(s) has recommended that I keep a private daily journal, as well as an ongoing ‘worry list’ in point form. I have not been very successful with either task.

Right now, I am worried about:

• Not being able to fall asleep
• Falling asleep and getting too little sleep to function well tomorrow
• Falling asleep with the help of a sleeping pill and being too chemically hungover to wake up in the morning
• An early-morning meeting at work
• Money to pay for:
  • Various outstanding bills related to moving
  • New hard drives (and a new media server to put them in) to replace the ones that have been failing (with data loss) over the last two months
  • The trip to NYC I took last weekend
  • Expenses incurred returning home by bus as a result of the (borrowed, ten year old) car blowing a gasket in upstate New York
  • A trip to Albany this weekend to go pick up the soon-to-be-repaired car and bring it back to Ottawa
  • Whatever part of the massive car repair bill the owner of the car doesn’t feel like paying
• If I’m going to lose 4 1/2 weeks saved vacation time due to sick leave / insurance issues at work
• Not being able to do an Ad·ver·sary (or Cyanotic, or…) tour in the next 12 months due to a lack of vacation time
• How a number of different people (and animals) that I love are doing
• Not having nearly enough time.

Hoping for a quiet day and a quieter evening, tomorrow.

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Yup, it’s true. I can’t keep it a secret any longer.

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Reading the coverage of Ted Kennedy’s death over the last couple of days, I was struck by two things: how much more human Mulroney’s comments are than the terrible statement given by Harper (especially compared to how Harper eulogized Reagan), and how much the surviving male Kennedys look like JFK.

Patrick Kennedy looks just like his uncle John’s portrait.

(Post title appropriated from Jeffrey Zeldman.)

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Photos from the Canadian War Museum

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Blinky "Wrathov" Khan

Mothra "Scrambles" Khan

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Things that make me sad:

• Not having support you need from friends
• Discussing power and gender
• Staying up all night (because you can’t sleep)
• Not having what you need to cook what you want
• Really missing the cats you lived with

Things that make me happy:

• Connecting with people you should have met a long time ago
• Discussing politics and strategy
• Staying up all night (because you don’t want to sleep)
• Breaking in new dishes with delivery pizza
• Finalizing plans to pick up new kittens

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There are a lot of things happening in my life that I’d like to write about, but my heart is heavy and my skin is raw. Instead, I’m going to write about this new contest from Electronic Arts:

Stay classy, EA.

I’ll give you a minute to re-read the ‘How To Win’ section a few times.

That’s right, EA literally wants you to sexually harass the booth babes at Comic-Con. You don’t have to settle for staring awkwardly at scantily-clad flesh and working up the nerve to brush your hand against an ass or two as you walk past them; their employer has actually posted a sexual bounty on them — so please feel free to grab a handful and get your money’s worth! And if your photos are the most ass-grabbingly great (keeping in mind step 3!) you’ll get to take them out to dinner in a fancy limo!

…

Goddamn it if EA isn’t the worst thing to happen to video games since Ultima Online. (Actually, scratch that. They published Ultima Online. I guess they’re just the worst thing.)

Every now and then I think about dropping everything and getting back into the video game industry, but then I am gripped by this fear, this panic, that somehow someday somewhere I would end up working for EA, and that’s enough to shake those dreams from my hair.

…

Oh, booth babes. Have we not yet visited enough ignominy and nerd germs upon you? Truly, you are the most underappreciated of all sex workers.

Corey & Vampirella. photo: roadkillbuddha

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Today’s subject: Joe Arpaio!

If you’re lucky enough not to live in AZ, you might not know about Joe Arpaio. He’s the Maricopa County Sheriff signed a promise to serve only one term when he was elected in 1992. He’s still the Sheriff. When it comes to drug warriors, this guy doesn’t mess around. He’s got a self-propelled howitzer with “Sheriff Arpaio’s War on Drugs” painted on it, with some tasteful lightning bolts added for effect.

From a New Yorker profile of Sheriff Joe (pdf):

Arpaio ordered small, heavily publicized deprivations. He banned cigarettes from his jails. Skin magazines. Movies. Coffee. Hot lunches. Salt and pepper–Arpaio estimated that he saved taxpayers thirty thousand dollars a year by removing salt and pepper. Meals were cut to two a day, and Arpaio got the cost down, he says, to thirty cents per meal. “It costs more to feed dogs than it does the inmates,” he told me. Jail, Arpaio likes to say, is not a spa– it’s punishment. He wants inmated whose keenest wish is never to get locked up again. He limits their television, he told me, to the Weather Channel, C-Span, and, just to aggravate their hunger, the Food Network. For a while, he showed them Newt Gingrich speeches. “They hated him,” he said cheerfully. Why the Weather Channel, a British reporter once asked. “So these morons will know how hot it’s going to be while they are working on my chain gangs.”

Arpaio wasn’t kidding about chain gangs. Foreign television reporters couldn’t get enough footage of his inmates shuffling through the desert. New ideas for the humiliation of people in custody–whom the Sheriff calls, with pervasive disgust, “criminals,” although most are actually awaiting trial, not convicted of any crime–kept occurring to him. He put his inmates in black-and-white striped uniforms. The shock value of these retro prisoner outifts was powerful and complex. There was comedy, nostalgia, dehumanization, even a whiff of something annihilationist. He created female chain gangs, “the first in the history of the world,” and, eventualy, juvenile chain gangs.

Joe Arpaio is directly and personally responsible for stillbirths and miscarriages; and the deaths, brain damage, and severe injuries of newborn babies. Women who go into labor while in his jail aren’t allowed to hold or even see their babies after they’re born, even the ones who survive.

Arpaio has a reality show on Fox called “Smile You’re Under Arrest.” The premise of the show is to use big-breasted women and promises of a $300 prize to get people with nonviolent warrants to show up at a nightclub taken over by Joe for this purpose, and filled with paid actors and undercover cops (all at county expense). Then they have to participate- on national television- in either a fashion show or a dancing contest. Joe hides behind a curtain or under a covered table during all this; and after the fashion show or dancing contest is over, he jumps out and arrests them. Meanwhile over 40,000 felony warrants, many of them for rape or murder, go unserved and the homicide rate has jumped 167%. I’m not making this shit up.

Every year, over 90,000 women are raped in the United States.

If you’re an activist (or spend much time around activists), you might know this already. You might even talk about it, argue about why it happens, the effect it has on people, how to stop it.

What is less well-known is that every year, over 140,000 men are raped in the United States.

No one talks about it because it happens inside of prisons. No one cares about it because it happens to prisoners. On the inside, guards use rape (both implied and actual) as a form of prisoner control. On the outside, people joke about it. Worse even, they see it as a form of punishment prisoners should endure, even though rape inside of a prison is an order of magnitude more likely to transmit a disease than rape outside of one.

This is what 140,000 people looks like:

Generations from now, our treatment of criminals will be looked at with the same disgust and horror that slavery is viewed with today, and our society will rightly be condemned as cruel and barbaric for it.