INGO RULES

INGO SWANN: THE FIRST REMOTE VIEWER

SCOOP

Perseid Meteor Shower

Strong Meteor Shower Expected Tonight

Last time the Swift-Tuttle Comet shed some debris into the Earth's orbital path, I was tripping acid in a haunted cemetery. I saw some things, e.g. worms under my skin, but there were too many clouds to see any Perseid meteors. The sky should be much clearer tonight, except the moon is unfortunately large and high in the sky.

LITE ILLUSIONS

Scopespoint

The future world government builds an observatory at the geographic north pole called Scopespoint. Its attendants are genetically engineered with an extended dendritic nerve-cable that hangs from the side of their skull. Colloquially it's known as a Scopesman's braid. The attendants are called Scopesmen.

There are four Scopesmen, one for each cardinal direction. There are four observatory discs at Scopespoint at the north pole, one for each direction. The Scopesmen attach their braids to their respective disks, which actually function exactly like enormous eyeballs. They are in reality large hollow dishes filled with tele-ocular fluid. Once a Scopesman is "plugged in," they are able to see a swath of the northern hemisphere 90 degrees in longitude and 90 degrees in latitude. When all four are observing, no event that occurs in the northern hemisphere escapes their notice. If one of the Scopesmen observes all events occurring between dawn and noon, then the Scopesman to his right will watch all events occurring between noon and dusk, his neighbor recording all happening from dusk to midnight, and so on, simultaneously.

The Scopesmen are chosen from a pool of hopeful neophytes. Their parents modified their DNA during their gestation to grant them the necessary physical capabilities to be a Scopesman. Three layers of interchangeable eyelids, one for shielding from radiation, another which expands the visual range into the ultraviolets, a third which shifts the range into infrared. Blinking muscles are atrophied and tear ducts are given greater capability. And of course, the aforementioned dendritic extension is engineered for.

The selection process is different for each of the four Scopesmen.

North is chosen through popular election; every man, woman and child on Earth is given a vote.

East is simply the neophyte with the greatest wealth.

South is not chosen by anyone. The applicant for South must preserve his title from usurpers through his own ingenuity.

West is chosen from the applicant pool by a supercomputer, one which processes an algorithm more complex than any human could decipher. The algorithm is terabytes long and gathers data from sources as varied as quasar pulsation cycles and spin orientations of quarks in Jupiter's Red Spot.

UFO's

To Mars

Martian Mounds.

Further evidence comes from infrared images of the Martian mounds, which show that they cool down more quickly at night than rock should, suggesting they are made of a fine-grained sediment such as mud.
With this new-found information, I am happy to introduce the "Don't worry about earth" package.
It includes a step-by-step introductory tape explicative of how to reach Mars when the time comes.

Cartesian Vortices

from Principia Philosophiae 1644

René Descartes (1596-1650), the French writer, is reffered to as the Father of Modern Philosophy and a key figure in the Scientific Revolution. His inventions of analytical geometry aren't overlooked either. But his theories on physics were in competition with the English Sir Isaac Newton at their time. And in the end, Newton's simple theory of "gravity" sounded more appealing than the complex mechanism of whirlpools Descartes proposed to solve. Of course he never did figure out a functional model for the orbits of bodies around the sun but he made stunning drawings of "globules" and "perturbations" in his attempts. He postulated that all matter is swirling around larger bodies (like planets and the sun), our solar system is just one of these countless bodies.

When we suppose that heaviness is a real quality of which all we know is that it has the force to move the body that possesses it towards the center of the earth, we find no difficulty in conceiving how it moves the body or how it is united to it. We do not suppose that the production of this motion takes place by a real contact between two surfaces, because we experience in ourselves that we have a specific notion to conceive it by. I think that we misuse this notion when we apply it to heaviness, which as I hope to show in my physics [ie the yet to be published Principia Philosophiae], is not anything really distinctly from body; but it was given to us for the purpose of conceiving the manner in which the mind moves the body.

Descartes to Elisabeth May 21, 1643

Editor in Chief,

Damon P Meriweather

Apollo and Daphne by Bernini

by Gian Lorenzo Bernini 1622-1625

Cupid, offended by Apollo's boastfulness, fired two arrows from his bow. One arrow to excite Apollo's love for Daphne, the nymph, and the second to make Daphne disgusted by Apollo. So as Apollo closes in on her she turns into a laurel tree.

DARKNESS by Lord Byron

first published in 1816

I had a dream, which was not all a dream.
The bright sun was extinguish'd, and the stars
Did wander darkling in the eternal space,
Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth
Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air;
Morn came and went--and came, and brought no day,
And men forgot their passions in the dread
Of this their desolation; and all hearts
Were chill'd into a selfish prayer for light:
And they did live by watchfires--and the thrones,
The palaces of crowned kings--the huts,
The habitations of all things which dwell,
Were burnt for beacons; cities were consum'd,
And men were gather'd round their blazing homes
To look once more into each other's face;
Happy were those who dwelt within the eye
Of the volcanos, and their mountain-torch:
A fearful hope was all the world contain'd;
Forests were set on fire--but hour by hour
They fell and faded--and the crackling trunks
Extinguish'd with a crash--and all was black.
The brows of men by the despairing light
Wore an unearthly aspect, as by fits
The flashes fell upon them; some lay down
And hid their eyes and wept; and some did rest
Their chins upon their clenched hands, and smil'd;
And others hurried to and fro, and fed
Their funeral piles with fuel, and look'd up
With mad disquietude on the dull sky,
The pall of a past world; and then again
With curses cast them down upon the dust,
And gnash'd their teeth and howl'd: the wild birds shriek'd
And, terrified, did flutter on the ground,
And flap their useless wings; the wildest brutes
Came tame and tremulous; and vipers crawl'd
And twin'd themselves among the multitude,
Hissing, but stingless--they were slain for food.
And War, which for a moment was no more,
Did glut himself again: a meal was bought
With blood, and each sate sullenly apart
Gorging himself in gloom: no love was left;
All earth was but one thought--and that was death
Immediate and inglorious; and the pang
Of famine fed upon all entrails--men
Died, and their bones were tombless as their flesh;
The meagre by the meagre were devour'd,
Even dogs assail'd their masters, all save one,
And he was faithful to a corse, and kept
The birds and beasts and famish'd men at bay,
Till hunger clung them, or the dropping dead
Lur'd their lank jaws; himself sought out no food,
But with a piteous and perpetual moan,
And a quick desolate cry, licking the hand
Which answer'd not with a caress--he died.
The crowd was famish'd by degrees; but two
Of an enormous city did survive,
And they were enemies: they met beside
The dying embers of an altar-place
Where had been heap'd a mass of holy things
For an unholy usage; they rak'd up,
And shivering scrap'd with their cold skeleton hands
The feeble ashes, and their feeble breath
Blew for a little life, and made a flame
Which was a mockery; then they lifted up
Their eyes as it grew lighter, and beheld
Each other's aspects--saw, and shriek'd, and died--
Even of their mutual hideousness they died,
Unknowing who he was upon whose brow
Famine had written Fiend. The world was void,
The populous and the powerful was a lump,
Seasonless, herbless, treeless, manless, lifeless--
A lump of death--a chaos of hard clay.
The rivers, lakes and ocean all stood still,
And nothing stirr'd within their silent depths;
Ships sailorless lay rotting on the sea,
And their masts fell down piecemeal: as they dropp'd
They slept on the abyss without a surge--
The waves were dead; the tides were in their grave,
The moon, their mistress, had expir'd before;
The winds were wither'd in the stagnant air,
And the clouds perish'd; Darkness had no need
Of aid from them--She was the Universe.

AN OTHERPLANET

Do you have the Badge? 100 little planet buttons were released into the vacuum. You can also buy one at the Heartland Cafe in Rogers Park. They come in 4 fluorescent colors + glow in the dark!

Plothole Manifesto

I, Damon P Meriweather, present you with the intangible form of Plothole Mag. Until the hard copies hit your hands in Spring, you will have to resort to the World Wide Web to connect with out brilliant energy.
As the driving force behind Plothole, I've categorized our intentions in Plothole's ROYGBIV Manifesto.

1. Be a periodical containing a collection of articles, stories, pictures, or other features.
2. Promote reader/writer interactivity with the printed medium.
3. Share the outlook of "post intellectual property".
4. Focus on the scientifically valid qualities of reality that suggest it's only an illusion.
5. Contain radical content far enough outside of the mainstream to be prohibitive of inclusion in more traditional print.
6. Strike you with a feeling of absurdity.
7. Conduct people power between arts, innovative dissent, and the fun.

Welcome to Phole. No Escape.

Sincerely,



Damon P Meriweather

Proto birth