Your Daily Awesome

Section 3: Throw away yourself and build a new you

Before you go to ground, destroy as much of the old you as possible. You want to go beyond making yourself disappear: You want to make it seem as if you never existed. This means that you should do as much of the following as possible before and after you disappear:

•Destroy all photographs you have access to before you disappear. This includes family volumes of photographs that family members have. Your family members may or may not be supportive and hand over (to your opposition) all of their photographs of you depending upon your situation. Your family could be forced to support your opposition through threat of law or through physical violence. If you destroy all photographs of you, they can’t be shown around gas stations and quick food stops.

•Discard all your worldly possessions except cash. Most importantly destroy and discard all of your credit cards! The instant you use a credit card or an ATM bank card while on the run is the instant the authorities or private investigators know where you are. Before you run you should empty all bank accounts anyway. Gas debit cards can also be used to find you. Telephone calling cards can be used to find you. In fact, any magnetic card with your name or the name of someone you know can and will be used to find your general area. Destroy them all. If the FBI, DEA, BATF, CIA, or any number of other agencies are involved in searching for you, they can pinpoint your location within minutes of you using a magnetic card.

Don’t even think about hanging onto a credit card or other type of magnetic card for an emergency. You might think about maxing-out your cards then converting what you purchase to quick cash… but don’t take cards with you! What you don’t have can’t tempt you to give your location away. When you’re cold and hungry you will be tempted to use any cards you keep so destroy them before that happens.

•Purchase clothes you normally wouldn’t consider wearing and put them on in a place where you won’t be observed. Cut your old clothes into pieces and flush them down the toilet — you don’t want your old clothes to be found.

•Abandon your car. Don’t bother driving your car into a lake or an ocean. They can be seen from helicopters or, at minimum, fresh tracks left in the mud surrounding lakes can be spotted from the air easier than by people from the ground. Since you’re giving up an asset, make giving it up work for you.

Abandoning your car in a place where you feel confident it will be stripped and sold by thieves is a good idea yet you’re left with having to walk out of a probably dangerous neighborhood.

Leave the pink slip of the car in the glove box to make it easier for thieves to chop and sell your abandoned car. Leave a door unlocked so they don’t have to break a window. You want the car to be taken in mass rather than picked apart on the street where a cop will spot it so it’s best that you leave the key in the ignition while you’re at it. Before you walk away from your car, leave the engine running, in fact, so that a thief will feel more comfortable stealing it. You could make it look like you’re just running into a store to buy something quickly.

•Purchase another car. In America one can slap down $300.00 and buy a pile of junk with no questions asked and no identification needed. If the seller has the pink slip and a key, you buy it if it’s cheap and doesn’t have anything a cop might consider stopping you for a safety violation.

Make sure that the back license plate has a current registration and that the exhaust doesn’t visibly smoke. Make sure the turn indicators are working and that you have headlights. Make sure the windshield has no cracks. Broken or missing break lights are often used as an excuse by police officers to pull over suspicious cars so make sure that the break lights are working.

Don’t borrow a friend’s car. Don’t even think about borrowing a family member’s car. There are cameras situated along America’s highways and, while I don’t know their resolving capabilities, I think it’s likely that the make and model of cars streaming past them can be made. Even if they can’t resolve your car, a borrowed car is a known avenue of your escape so avoid it.

•Don’t fill up your newly-acquired car with any of your personal belongings. If you get stopped by a cop or a cop drives by you, you don’t want it to look like you’re packed up to the ceiling with all your worldly possessions. You need to discard everything you own and don’t let it show that you’re doing anything other than commuting to or from work. Even if the cop doesn’t stop you, if word gets around that you’ve gone missing, the cop is more likely to remember a stuffed car than all the countless cars simply commuting. They’ll match your profile against your description and may recall the general — if not the exact — type of car you may be driving. If you want to escape notice of the cops, you need to blend in.

Cops work off of profiles: They are trained to spot the unusual as well as how to spot individuals fitting a variety of profiles. Someone on the run fits several profiles. You want to “fall out of the net” and slip through the typical police profiles.

A cup of coffee on the dashboard in front of a guy or gal wearing work clothes arouses no suspicions. You’re on your way to work, not running from someone.

Don’t studiously avoid catching a cop’s eye, by the way. Lean back in your seat, left arm on the window sill, right hand on the steering wheel at the 6:00 O’Clock position. Take a sip of your coffee, water, or Diet Coke every now and then, and try to act like you’re a mindless commuter getting from point A to point B with the rest of the lemmings.

I could read this stuff all day

Keever’s dreamlike photographs are pretty sensuous, but the most interesting part might actually be how she makes them. (Kind of a problematic conundrum, no? No?)

via Metafilter

This video is a little long (a whopping 18 minutes!), but I found it fascinating. Savage-Rumbaugh is a leading expert on bonobos, a Congolese ape that she has worked with for years. In this video, she demonstrates their understanding of the English language, plus their ability to use tools (they start fires with lighters and extinguish them with jugs of water), plus their capacity to, well, to play Pac Man.

via Nerdcore

I couldn’t find any more information on this amazing building, but these images are entirely captivating.

If these two essays bring you a fraction of the intrigue and happiness they brought me, your afternoon is about to get a whole lot better:

The Abyss: Music and Amnesia, by Oliver Sacks:

In March of 1985, Clive Wearing, an eminent English musician and musicologist in his mid-forties, was struck by a brain infection—a herpes encephalitis—affecting especially the parts of his brain concerned with memory. He was left with a memory span of only seconds—the most devastating case of amnesia ever recorded. New events and experiences were effaced almost instantly. As his wife, Deborah, wrote in her 2005 memoir, Forever Today:

‘His ability to perceive what he saw and heard was unimpaired. But he did not seem to be able to retain any impression of anything for more than a blink. Indeed, if he did blink, his eyelids parted to reveal a new scene. The view before the blink was utterly forgotten. Each blink, each glance away and back, brought him an entirely new view. I tried to imagine how it was for him. . . . Something akin to a film with bad continuity, the glass half empty, then full, the cigarette suddenly longer, the actor’s hair now tousled, now smooth. But this was real life, a room changing in ways that were physically impossible.’

In addition to this inability to preserve new memories, Clive had a retrograde amnesia, a deletion of virtually his entire past.

Slights of Mind: The Science of Magic, by George Johnson

Sounding more like a professor than a comedian and magician, Teller described how a good conjuror exploits the human compulsion to find patterns, and to impose them when they aren’t really there.

‘In real life if you see something done again and again, you study it and you gradually pick up a pattern,’ he said as he walked onstage holding a brass bucket in his left hand. ‘If you do that with a magician, it’s sometimes a big mistake.’

Pulling one coin after another from the air, he dropped them, thunk, thunk, thunk, into the bucket. Just as the audience was beginning to catch on — somehow he was concealing the coins between his fingers — he flashed his empty palm and, thunk, dropped another coin, and then grabbed another from a gentlemen’s white hair. For the climax of the act, Teller deftly removed a spectator’s glasses, tipped them over the bucket and, thunk, thunk, two more coins fell.

As he ran through the trick a second time, annotating each step, we saw how we had been led to mismatch cause and effect, to form one false hypothesis after another. Sometimes the coins were coming from his right hand, and sometimes from his left, hidden beneath the fingers holding the bucket.

He left us with his definition of magic: ‘The theatrical linking of a cause with an effect that has no basis in physical reality, but that — in our hearts — ought to.’

If Awesome Tapes from Africa simply collected these cassette covers from Ghana, Kenya, Mali, and beyond, it would be worth a mention for that alone. But the blog actually posts all of the music as downloadable mp3s, creating an invaluable crash course on contemporary sounds from the most musically rich place on the planet. Happy listening.

Animal Logic
Previously on YDA: Barnes’ photographs of Roman Starlings
In New York? See Animal Logic in person

Carlo Giovani is a Brazilian graphic designer and illustrator who does amazing things with paper.

via Coudal

Last year, I ran an idea by my editor for a short feature: I proposed listening to a single song (I hadn’t decided which yet) nonstop, for a good length of time—an entire waking day, for instance—and write about the experience. Keeping track of the thoughts that arose throughout the repetitious affair—frustrations, insights into the song, maddening lunacy, etc.—and shaping it into a little essay. My pitch might have been a little off, because it was met with middling enthusiasm, so I promptly forgot about it and moved on with life. But it turns out that Steve Delahoyde of the brilliant Coudal Partners had a very similar idea, and made a short film about it. He used his weekly drive from Iowa City to Chicago to submit himself to an endless loop of Abba’s “Dancing Queen.” The film’s really fun, and after watching it, I’m glad Delahoyde took the bullet and subjected himself to this instead of me. Watch the film here.

via Mental Floss

British artists Tim Noble and Sue Webster make sculptures that are unremarkable in and of themselves, but which cast amazing realistic shadows onto gallery walls. This first piece is “Dirty White Trash (With Gulls)”, composed from the artist’s rubbish from the six months it took to create piece (plus a pair of dead seagulls, for good measure).

via Think or Thwim

Home of the Figure Four Process. Woooooo!

Tiger’s Nest Monastery: “Legend has it that Guru Rinpoche, the second Buddha, flew onto the cliff on the back of a tigress, and then meditated in a cave which now exists within the monastery walls.”

Vishnu Temple of Srirangam: “Legend has it that a long time ago, a sage rested and put down a statue of Vishnu reclining on a great serpent. When he was ready to resume his journey, he discovered that the statue couldn’t be moved, so a small temple was built over it. Over centuries, the temple “grew” as larger ones were built over the existing buildings.”

Wat Rong Khun: “The all-white, highly ornate structure gilded in mosaic mirrors that seem to shine magically, is done in a distinctly contemporary style. Chalermchai expects it will take another 90 years to complete, making it the Buddhist temple equivalent of the Sagrada Familia church in Barcelona, Spain.”

Borobudur: “In the 19th century, Dutch occupiers of Indonesia found a massive ancient ruin deep in the jungles of Java. What they discovered was the complex of Borobudur, a gigantic structure built with nearly 2 million cubic feet of stones.”

Many more at a truly fantastic post over at Neatorama

Psychologist Robert Epstein certainly seems to think so, as evidenced by this interview in Psychology Today.

Why do you believe that adolescence is an artificial extension of childhood?

In every mammalian species, immediately upon reaching puberty, animals function as adults, often having offspring. We call our offspring “children” well past puberty. The trend started a hundred years ago and now extends childhood well into the 20s. The age at which Americans reach adulthood is increasing—30 is the new 20—and most Americans now believe a person isn’t an adult until age 26.

What are some likely consequences of extending one’s childhood?

Imagine what it would feel like—or think back to what it felt like—when your body and mind are telling you you’re an adult while the adults around you keep insisting you’re a child. This infantilization makes many young people angry or depressed, with their distress carrying over into their families and contributing to our high divorce rate. It’s hard to keep a marriage together when there is constant conflict with teens.

We have completely isolated young people from adults and created a peer culture. We stick them in school and keep them from working in any meaningful way, and if they do something wrong we put them in a pen with other “children.” In most nonindustrialized societies, young people are integrated into adult society as soon as they are capable, and there is no sign of teen turmoil. Many cultures do not even have a term for adolescence. But we not only created this stage of life: We declared it inevitable. In 1904, American psychologist G. Stanley Hall said it was programmed by evolution. He was wrong.

read the whole interview

via WFMU

“Mount Everest is the highest mountain on Earth, as measured by the height of its summit above sea level. In May 2005, artist Xu Zhen led an ascent on Everest, and succeeded in removing the summit of the mountain, reducing its height by 186cm, Xu Zhen’s own height. The summit of the Mount Everest has been touring art exhibits throughout the world ever since.”

more at Next Nature

“PTW won the international design competition to create the National Swimming Centre for the 2008 Beijing Olympics in late 2003. The design, known as the “Watercube”, plays on the geometry of water bubbles, fantastically crystallised as a massive rectangular form. The structure’s elemental shape is specifically designed to work in harmony with the circular main stadium, designed by Herzog and de Meuron, both of which will rise on the Beijing Olympic Green in a spectacular duality of forms. The facility will be used prior and post games as a multi-purpose leisure and elite swimming centre.”

The Watercube
via Rocketboom

“In the Forties and Fifties, Spike Jones used to regularly demolish pop music. Listening to this wonderfulness makes me wish we had more of this kind of creative irreverance. Yes, there’s the Weird Al song parodists, but Spike & Co. had a sonic assault - they didn’t parody lyrics so much as they rearranged the music for maximum anarchic effect. What song can’t be improved upon by dropping in silly sound effects?”

Link

“Seripop are 2 people who make prints , record covers , books and , illustrations and other things in Montreal Canada.” They have a ton of great stuff on their website, including fine art prints (super cheap, incidentally), but I really like their posters for rock shows best. The integrating and coding of useful information into the brain-melting design work cracks me up and fascinates me.

Seripop

“Mouna Andraos was showing her Power Cart in the streets of Williamsburg [over the weekend], offering alternative power to passersby in need of charging their mobile phone. The mobile unit is inspired by street vendors, knife sharpeners from India, refills of gas in Africa, fake Gucci bags in Paris and chair massages in New York, the Power Cart looks and feels like another service for the city of today. Where ever you might be in the world, hail the Power Car for a quick fix. The Power Car owner will turn the crank for you and get the electricity you need, one minute of cranking at a time. With a little help from the solar panel.”

link

Originally published in a 2000 issue of Drawn & Quarterly, Sikoryak’s re-envisioning of Crime and Punishment as a Batman comic is now online in its entirety.

via the Ephemerist