don’t use the f-word on an airplane

You’ve been warned.

In a story about a woman who was kicked off a plane for crying, we also read as follows:

“This is only the most recent case of airline passengers getting kicked off flights. In April, a Horizon Air passenger was kicked off his flight for being too tall. In June, a man was taken off a United flight for using the F-word, while a college student got the boot from a US Airways flight that same month because his pants were too baggy.”

Kicked off for being too tall? How tall was he, exactly?

Theyab Awana dies in crash

I posted this video during the summer: the backwards penalty kick by UAE against Lebanon, which was very funny despite the poor sportsmanship involved. (The coach apparently yanked him from the game for this.)

But the kicker, Theyab Awana, has DIED IN A CAR CRASH, last night in Abu Dhabi. Sad story.

“supercomputer predicts revolution”

HERE.

The graph showing a dip in tone in articles about Egypt just before the revolution is interesting.

I’m far more skeptical about the boast that the computer “predicted the location of Osama bin Laden to within 200 km.” I think any one of us could have predicted the location of bin Laden to within 200 km, so that’s not much of a test. He was obviously either in eastern Afghanistan or somewhere across the border, and that part of Pakistan just isn’t wide enough for 200 km to be a very hard-edged target.

The Road to Objects

In early March in Amsterdam, I gave two lectures. The second, “Meillassoux’s Virtual Future,” was already published in continent some months ago.

Now, they have published my first Amsterdam lecture, “The Road to Objects.”

Instead of linking you to my article, I’ll link you to the front page of continent, HERE. Tim Morton and others also have articles there.

Heidegger’s birthday

Heidegger would have been 122 today.

The only scary thing about that is that I clearly remember his 100th. I was a senior in college, and a few of us held a small reading session in honor of the occasion. The Beiträge had just been published, and since I wouldn’t see a copy of it for another year, I simply assumed that it must really be the second Sein und Zeit (it isn’t). The East Block was coming apart just months after my first and only visit to a bit of it, and the future looked nicely unpredictable for the first time in my bored Cold War geopolitical life. The Chicago Cubs even clinched a rare division title that very night (which they would waste with a thoroughly mediocre losing performance against San Francisco in the NLCS). Good times in those days.

Also, I was reading Fichte enthusiastically at the time, and truly believed that by thinking a thing outside thought, you thereby convert it into a thought.

Tamanya watching street cats eat

Recent stories:

*she jumped up and grabbed the ceiling fan while it was moving and was thrown off, without injury

*she was fascinated the first time she saw toast pop out of the toaster. The next day, Wafaa heard the toaster pop and then heard Tamanya scream and run out of the kitchen. Presumably she burned her paws on the hot toaster surface.

*she jumped in the toilet

Lotus Litany

Tim Morton asked me if the Buddhist Latour Litany to which I was referring was in fact the opening of the Lotus Sutra.

Reading the marvellous litany HERE, I think it might be. I happen to own a copy of the Lotus Sutra, but it’s in my office, and I’d need to check it to see if it’s the source I had in mind. But this is a fantastic litany anyway. See for yourself.

BADco goes to Novi Sad, Serbia

Announcement HERE.

I had the chance to meet Nikolina and Goran briefly in Venice this summer. And two years ago, I also spent a very pleasant day in Novi Sad.

my heart stopped

“Putin back in the running for 2012”

For a split second I read “Palin back in the running for 2012.”

Meillassoux on Mallarmé, second half

It’s time to start the office day, but on the bus ride and then over coffee, I finished Meillassoux’s book.

In this book, he never makes an explicit link between his interpretation of Mallarmé and his own philosophy, though there’s a trace of it there. Having worked hard to establish the hidden “707” code in the first part of the book, in the second part he subverts this code by showing that Mallarmé deliberately left some ambiguity as to whether the code was real or the result of chance. Rather than having chosen one possibility out of the many open to him, Mallarmé is a kind of super-Hamlet (and Hamlet is discussed in Meillassoux’s book), not just hesitating for awhile before deciding on the unique number, but infinitizing his hesitation into a virtuality of all possible outcomes. Thus the deliberate haziness surrounding the 707 code, which in one sense seems to be definitely there, but in another sense is dependent on purely contingent decisions such as whether to count non-hyphenated compound words as one or two.

In any case, I have the feeling that we can expect Mallarmé to play a key role in the multi-volume reworking of L’Inexistence divine, whose first volume now seems to be tangibly within publishing distance, though you’d have to ask the author if you want to know the exact date.