FIFTY FAVORITE BOOKS

A Facebook Friend recently posted a link to David Bowie's list of his 100 favorite books.  I am amazed that anyone can have 100 favorite anything.  I thought I would go through my library and see if I could find 100 favorite books but I could only come up with 50, and that was a bit of a stretch.  Not all of them are favorites because they are good - in fact some are favorites because they are so very bad, crazy or bizarre - but all of them have been or continue to be a significant influence on me in some way.  Many of them are novels which stand out in my mind as superior or unique, to which my mind often returns.  There are other books which have also been great influences but are not now in my library - this is just what I have on hand.  They are presented in the order in which I found them, with no annotation or description, the downy cheek of the best next to the scaly jowl of the worst.

The Avadhuta Gita of Dattatreya

An Autobiography - Mahatma Gandhi

The Androgynous Christ - Edward L. Kessel

Systemantics - John Gall

Optimism One - F. M. Esfandiary

How to Think Straight - Robert H. Thouless

The Greatest Adventure - John Taine

Beast In View - Margaret Millar

The Devil is Dead - R. A. Lafferty

The Manuscript Found in Saragossa - Jan Potocki

est: Playing the Game the New Way - Carl Frederick

The Greatest Power in the Universe - U. S. Anderson

A Small Classical Dictionary - E. H. Blakeney 

Meditations - Marcus Aurelius

The Enchiridion - Epictetus

Etidorhpa - John Uri Lloyd

Galaxy 666 - Pel Torro

The Clones - P. T. Olemy

Werner Erhard - W. W. Bartley III

Oahspe: A New Bible

Hawkers and Walkers in Early America - Richardson Wright

The Mound Builders - Robert Silverberg

Dictionary of Symbols - Liungman

The Real Rain Man ... Kim Peek - Frank Peek

Neo-Tech Power - Frank R. Wallace

The Omega Seed - Paolo Soleri

The Bathroom - Alexander Kira

Alice in Wonderland etc. - Lewis Carroll

Star Maker - Olaf Stapledon

Wanda Hickey's Night of Golden Memories and Other Disasters - Jean Shepherd

Sunset Magazine's New Western Garden Book

Joe Gould's Secret - Joseph Mitchell

The Split Atom: The Last Human Pair on Earth: A Whirling of Ideas - Dr. B. Belove

America Betrayed - Albert D. Nelson

The Three Christs of Ypsilanti - Milton Rokeach

The Plungers and the Peacocks - Dana L. Thomas

The Bridge on the Drina - Ivo Andric

Mucusless Diet Healing System - Prof. Arnold Ehret

Enzyme Intelligence: Whence and Whither - Nels Quevli

Kitsch - Gillo Dorfles

Mayhew's London

Cut It Down To One Page, I'm In a Hurry - John Believer

Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds - Mackay

Hard Cash - Charles Reade

Nightmare Abbey - Thomas Love Peacock

The Book of the SubGenius

Kooks - Donna Kossy

Ritual in the Dark - Colin Wilson

Marjoe - Steven M. Gaines

Dare To Be Great - Rudy Maxa

VEP COMICS #0 NOW AVAILABLE

My collection of crazy animal stories by Victor Pazmino is now available to download as a ZIP file or as a CBZ file. It is also available for download from the Digital Comic Museum, but you may need to sign in to be able to access it.  I find I have misspelled Guayaquil, in the biographical information, for which I apologize but I am not going to go back and fix it now.  I will just have to look like an ignoramus. This is the kind of thing it is and I think you will find it is some pretty nutty stuff:

VEP Comics

Here is a little project I am working on.  I fell instantly in love with the wild bright style of cartoonist Victor Pazmino, and am working up a pseudocomic collecting some of his wacky animal stories from such comics as Hi-Jinx, Ha Ha and Giggle which are available online.  This is the cover I have adapted from Happy Comics #13:

STRUCTURE SYNTH BASICS - HOW TO USE YOUR BRAIN

I enjoy fiddling with Structure Synth as a mental exercise.  I noticed in some of the examples a certain lack of elegance, and in the course of figuring out how things work I decided to clean up something I thought was executed in a shockingly crude way - building a hollow box. 

Here is the script, showing how to do the same thing in a more elegant way.  This can be applied to almost anything in life.  You can hammer away at it or you can stop and think.

// Two ways to build a hollow box:

// 1: brute force - define and locate

// each member

rule frame {

{ s 0.1 1.1 0.1 x 5 z 5 } box

{ s 0.1 1.1 0.1 x 5 z -5 } box

{ s 0.1 1.1 0.1 x -5 z 5 } box

{ s 0.1 1.1 0.1 x -5 z -5 } box

{ s 1 0.1 0.1 y 5 z 5 } box

{ s 1 0.1 0.1 y 5 z -5 } box

{ s 1 0.1 0.1 y -5 z 5 } box

{ s 1 0.1 0.1 y -5 z -5 } box

{ s 0.1 0.1 1 y 5 x 5 } box

{ s 0.1 0.1 1 y 5 x -5 } box

{ s 0.1 0.1 1 y -5 x 5 } box

{ s 0.1 0.1 1 y -5 x -5 } box

}

{ y 2 } frame

// 2: Use the program:

// create two frame members

rule mem {

{ s 0.1 1.1 0.1 x 5 z 5 } box

{ s 0.1 1.1 0.1 x -5 z 5 } box

}

// make them into a square

rule sq
{

mem

{ rz 90 } mem

}

// make two squares and two sets

//of frame members into a hollow box

rule frame2
{

sq

{ z 1 } sq

{ rx 90 y 1} mem

{ rx -90 y -1} mem

}

// Here they are in a row.

mem

{x 2 } sq

{ x 4 } frame2

ONE UP ON IMDB

Maybe you are old enough, or have watched enough old TV shows, to know who Gale Gordon was.  He was best known for his roles as eternally flustered and flabbergasted authority figures opposite Lucille Ball on The Lucy Show and Eve Arden on Our Miss Brooks.  He also played Dennis the Menace's foil Mister Wilson for the final two seasons of the show, and had recurring roles in Make Room for Daddy and a number of other programs.  During the '30s and '40s he worked primarily in radio drama which is unfortunately not as definitively chronicled as video.  IMDb lists his first film appearance as an uncredited role as radio announce in the 1933 comedy Elmer the Great.  Yet here he is in a momentary appearance with Rochelle Hudson in Is My Face Red? (1932).  I may not be the first person to notice this but I am the first to make a big deal about what a hot-shot he is for doing so.  Take that, Internet Movie Database, you don't know everything.

STRUCTURE SYNTH BASICS 2

Here is a very simple thing that took me a while to figure out.  It makes a difference what order things are in, in a single set of brackets.  The script on the left changes the  size, then rotates it.  The one on the right rotates it and then changes the size. If I understand it correctly, it seems to apply changes in brackets from right to left. 

The complete script for this image (without the text, which I added in Gimp ) is:

{ rz 45 s 1 0.2 1 } box

 { x 2 s 1 0.2 1 rz 45 } box

STRUCTURE SYNTH BASICS

I've been playing with a program called Structure Synth this week, which has the possibility to create extremely complex imagery with very simple scripts. Ubuntu linux users can find it and the Sunflow renderer in the Ubuntu Software Center. There is an augmented version available from Anandamide, but I can't get it to build in linux. If you search around you can see a lot of amazing pictures people have made with it.  It has limitations, but I like that.  I have done a few architectural type things with it that are kind of interesting.  Like this:

One problem is that there is very little entry-level instruction, and by very little I mean none.  I thought the best way to learn the basics was to try to write a few simple instructive scripts, so here goes.

The image above was created using the following script, which can be pasted right into the program, where it will appear in colors that make it a lot easier to understand.  I have added explanatory notes:

// a two component script

8 * { x 1.5 ry 45 hue -20 } // builds a series of boxes and 

// changes their color

6 * { x 1 s 1.1 ry -35 hue 10 } box // applies this to each of 

// the boxes, changing size and color. 

 // Red is the default color and the hue modification number

// is degrees on the color wheel.

// Locations are defined by coordinates - x (l-r), y (u-d), z (f-b)

// ry means rotate along the y axis. ditto for rx and rz

// Putting a size change into the brackets makes it recursive, 

// each box that much smaller.

// to make it uniform, add it as a prefix, as 1 * ( s 0.9 } at the 

//beginning

rule example

{

8 * { x 1.5 ry 45 hue -20 }

6 * { x 1 s 1.1 ry -35 hue 10 }

box

}

// makes this into a rule which can be called up by the name 

//example

1 * { z 20 } 5 * { y 2 s 0.9 } example

// sets the location 10 away in direction z, then creates it five

// times modified in size and y location

// the second bracket builds the structure 2 units up in 

//direction y

//to put it on the same level as the original add y -2 to the

// first bracket

This image was rendered with the internal raytracer, which creates shadows. The script with instructive notes follows:

set seed 45

// ambiguous rules have two rules with the same name.

rule a1

{

8 * { x 1 ry 45 hue 30 } box

}

// this makes a ring of boxes.

rule a1

{

1 * { y -1} 8 * { y 1 ry 45 hue -30 } box

}

// This makes a stack of boxes starting on the same level.

1 * { s 20 0.1 20 y -5 color grey } box

// This makes something for them to sit on.

// Colors can be defined by hex code (#ff3ad5 or #f3d) or by 

// preset names like grey, white, etc.

10 * { z 3 ry 45 } a1

// this creates ten instances, selecting at random between 

// box and stack each time

//every time you build it, it will change unless you use the 

// set seed command

So there you go.  You can change and fiddle with anything in the code, and the program comes with a lot of other examples which will reveal a lot of complexity and potential.  Have fun.

PRE-SPRING UPDATE

For those who enjoy this sort of thing, here is some of it.  The bowl of the birdbath someone left out on the curb a few years ago started breaking up last year, so I molded a new one by making a hole in the soft soil of one of the planting beds and casting it in place.  It needed a depression in the bottom, 1 inch deep and 5 inches diameter, so I faked up a thing at the bottom of the hole and miraculously it all worked out.  I dug it out and hosed it down and it looked pretty good. It fits over the top of the pedestal fine and it holds water.  I used one bag of mortar mix.  Here is a tip I already knew so I didn't have to learn it by accident - don't dump the whole bag into the mixing tub.  Save some in case you get it a little too wet, and you can balance it out.  Here is the hand-molded rustic birdbath: [Addendum - I removed the inner tray, remnant of the old leaking bowl.  The wire frame is  primarily to keep the crows off, but the little birds like to perch on it and scope things out before they go in.]

I didn't dig out the compost heap last year, so this is the year for it.  Below is the sifting screen I built for Frankenstein the Cart, all salvaged materials except half a dozen screws:

I dump the compost in, lift the handles on the near end in an underhand grip, and shake.  The well-digested compost from the bottom of the heap goes right through and whatever is left in the screen will go back in the heap for another year or two.  I moved the upper half of the heap onto a tarp in the yard because it is mostly undigested, and it will go back into the enclosure today.  Here is what ten minutes of shaking the sifter provides:

I filled a big plastic trash barrel, and dumped a couple of big mounds onto planting beds to be distributed and worked into the soil when it is a little less muddy.  It took me two shifts to sift it all - the first day I moved the top of the heap and sifted half of it, and was pretty wiped out from the heavy upper body exercise and unaccustomed sun exposure.  I took a day off and did the rest of the sifting in about an hour, then took a long bike ride that afternoon to balance out the exercise.  Today I move the heap back into the enclosure and go work out at the health club this afternoon.  I am like some kind of vegetarian organic gardening health nut computer geek cartoon.

SCANNERCAM BLOG

If you want to read about how I turned and old flatbed scanner into a camera, go to my blog called SCANNERCAM.  Thank you.

ILLUSTRATIONS: ATLAS SHRUGGED

Recently it has been my habit to do rapid  illustrations of some of the images that stick in my mind from my reading.  Here are two illustrations for Atlas Shrugged. Sharpie marker, grey shader marker and white prismacolor on sketch paper, approx. 6" x 8"

THE VULTURE IS MOLTING

"The penetrating study of a businessman's greed. A fearless revelation of man's depravity."  Imaginary novel mentioned in Atlas Shrugged to illustrate the decadence of modern society.