You’ll have to watch Madge Weinstein for the full receep. Madame L. was to have Madge and BicycleMark for lunch. Sounds v. delish. I hope she reports further. I also hope they thought to bring something.

The YeastRadio segment enlightens. Madge interviews Max Keiser and Stacy (from Karmabanque Radio — where the tired and oppressed can hear some “jolly good rants” and extremely metaphorical financial entertainment about the neo-feudal corporate occupation and the suicide consumers they inspire. Leave audio messages at +44 2024935755). Max likens Americans to “ducks on a massive foie gras farm,” force-fed consumers. The insights came fast and furious, insights like “the American dollar is a fiat currency.” Max’s “See Whitey Run” explains the foundation for this assertion better than I can… okay, as well as I can and it’s musically tasteful besides.

Unlike Amanda and ze Frank, Madge has a forthright monetization thing going… ads for godaddy show up in the black space from time to time (madge1 is the Godaddy discount code!) Following the “journey of the artist” through this lengthy vidcast is at times sobering (with thoughts like “decapitalize them [the corporations] now or they will decapitate you later”). But Max is such a light-hearted economist that he pulls us out of the dismal parts with practical suggestions such as this one regarding a new triangle trade operation with Japan, the American consumer, and the American eleemosynary community wherein we lose weight, the Japanese tastes are satisfied and we save the whales! here’s how it works: the Japanese have reintroduced whaling because of a taste for fine blubber. This is not itself a bad thing, but it does threaten our huge finny friends, the cetacean community. American consumers often use liposuction for weight loss. Rather than discard the blubber as medical waste, why not sell it to Japan. This improves the balance of payments, meets the Japanese demand for fine blubber and indeed with our improved economic circumstances we can contribute more financially to save the whales from extinction.

There was a bunch of stuff relating to bulldogs and Caravaggio that went just over my head, but I enjoyed Madge’s play with the kiwi fruits and the beauty tips, the poise and balance secrets that Stacy shared with her. After watching this Yeast Radio segment, I can see why so many blog personalities have found her captivating.

We be stylin’… food stylin!

We picked enough black-caps to have some on our ice cream tonight, and to make a few jars of jam. Beth Hastings is known far and wide for her micro-preserve operation. White Cedar Farms each year produces several jars of jam and a few jars of jelly… I mean, it must be jelly…

I think we’ll have our ice cream in front of the tube tonight… watching Rosemary’s Nephew in “Cineraria” “Siddhartha” “Syriana” — yeah, “Syriana.” I understand he put on 30 pounds for this film. He should have tried our pie. He could have added fifty.

I was unpacking an LCD flat panel monitor and Beth remarked that more and more twen-cen sci-fi concepts have been actualized. Flat panels were the stuff of fantasy in the earlier days of Ferdinand Braun’s cathode ray tube. Fifty years later, space saving, energy efficient, mobile, scalable sized electronic displays were still the stuff of some fictionalized future.  Now three dimensional displays are right around the corner.

Consider the memory cube: John Varley, one of my faves, presents one instance of high density storage in his 1976 story “Overdrawn at the Memory Bank.” (…a man who mentally inhabits a lion in the Kenya Disneyland must live temporarily within the virtual reality of his memory storage cube while his misplaced body is located.) We’re not there yet… at least we haven’t put limitless storage in small packages on the mass market yet, but 4GB flash drives have been available for a while. Science fiction stuff.

But the most ubiquitous advance, the one that tickles Beth the most, is the cell phone. With all the personal functions turned on, a cell phone is mighty close to the universal information appliance that IBM is looking for and that Dick Tracy possessed. Beth observes that one of the coolest things about the cell phone is that everyone has their own phone number. In the dark ages - think 1980 - phones were tied to locations. If you paid the bill, you might have thought it was “your” phone number, but phones were tied to locations, stationary instruments fixed by the hard-wiring of the switched network. When you moved, you got a new number.  And there was a directory. Not only was there a directory by name, but there was also an address directory so telemarketeers could selectively annoy people with messages targeted to their neighborhood, street, or household.  Before Beth mentioned it, I hadn’t thought about the fact that now I own my number and can port it to one cell service provider or another and there is NO DIRECTORY. When I move, I can keep the same number, even if I move out of the switched exchange where land-line numbers are allocated. Cell service doesn’t care. This idea that everyone has there own number is the stuff of science fiction. And the cell phone is just one wireless modality, one that wouldn’t have surprised Ferdinand Braun. And what about Voice over IP?

Listen. Did you hear that? It sounded like the clatter of a teletype machine — the death throes of the Networkasaurus. But the seeds of its smaller, faster and more flexible successor are already growing in your personal computer, telephone, and cable system. — Frank Catalano, When Dinosaurs Ruled the Airwaves