So far 67 attendees at Chuck Palahniuk’s book readings have fainted. They all did not attend the same reading, there’s no chicken salad food poisoning or stuffy room syndrome that can account for the dropping of audience members. And it’s not just the ladies.

Portland, Oregon: 2 men faint
Borders: 2 faint, man and woman
Seattle: 2 more men faint
San Francisco: 3 more people faint
Berkeley: 3 more [apparently the words “corn and peanuts” were particularly horrifying.]
Beverly Hills library, Los Angeles: woman’s husband faints, in the men’s bathroom another man faints and cracks his head on the sink
Columbia University: 2 students fall victim to Palahniuk’s prose
Leeds and Cambridge, Britain: more fainters …

67 people so far have fainted at readings of Chuck Palahniuk’s short story “Guts.”

Palahniuk says in a Telegraph article:
Quote: My goal was to write a new form of horror story, something based on the ordinary world, without supernatural monsters or magic. Guts, and the book that contained it, would be a trapdoor down into some place dark. A place only you could go, alone. Only books have that power.

Apparently carrots, candles, swimming pools, microwave popcorn and bowling balls are also involved, but as far as we know, not as faint-inducing as corn and peanuts.

The story is included in Palahniuk’s new novel Haunted. I suggest reading it with a medical attendant standing by.

On June 11th (4pm-10pm), Seamrippers craft collective will be hosting the MOBILIVRE-BOOKMOBILE Project at their space: the pink door at 436 West Pender, Vancouver. (Also the closing day for Seamrippers’ Mini Book Show.)

Mobilivre-Bookmobile Info, www.mobilivre.org

Project Mobilivre-Bookmobile explores the tradition of the travelling library; you know, the book van that used to come down all the rural routes? If you don’t, this is the coolest bookmobile I’ve ever seen.

The Bookmobile is a vintage 1959 Airstream.

[UPDATE: I’m having trouble with the root for this image. Have a look at the mobilivre.org site.]

The MOBILIVRE-BOOKMOBILE project is based primarily in Montreal, Canada and Philadelphia, USA. This is the fifth year of the touring exhibition of artist books, zines and independent publications.

The BOOKMOBILE visits a variety of venues in Canada and the US including community centres, schools, libraries, festivals, artist-run centres, and galleries.

Also Seamrippers is its own damn cool place.
436 West Pender, 604.689.SEAM (7326)
www.seamrippers.ca

James and I entered the world of OS X this weekend. Life is different.

I’m not good at the initial discovery stage, in technology anyway. I like someone who knows what they are doing to show me around, then I’m happy to go off exploring. My first impressions of OS X is that it is not intuitive in the ways I expect it to be and sometimes it is dumb.

Things I don’t like but know I’ll get used to:
I dislike that the sleep, restart, shut down has moved from the right-hand side to the Apple menu.
I dislike that I have no idea what application are running, where do you see that now? How do I switch from one app. to the other? [Wow, I just discovered the little triangles. Ok, but I hate the dashboard, can it go away and only be viewable when you want it? I’m sure it can. I must find that preference.]
I dislike that our monitor goes black with the words “No Input”. It seems this is the sleep mode, but the computer is actually active so why the blank? I don’t know yet.
I dislike the windows. I haven’t figured out yet the logic of where things are. When you double click on the hard drive, you get a left-hand column, then the next column shows the folders in the hard drive. Ok, what the hell are the things in the left-hand column. There’s an applications folder here, but also one in the harddrive folder. There’s the stupid house icon “James” (see below “Things I’ll always hate”), a documents folder (where does that live?), Movies, Music and Pictures.
When I put my music in the Music folder, it wasn’t accessible from iTunes. Sometimes computers make me feel dumb.

Things I’ll always hate:
On set up you define a user. James and I share the computer but I put his name as our first user. That made him Administrator, with a shortname of James. When we realized that we don’t want to be separate users, just one user, we also realized that you can never change the shortname for the Admin person. That really sucks. And why can’t you change it? You can change the user name and password. Our computer is forever James. And there’s a stupid house icon that I don’t understand.
I hate that when we started up the mini, it didn’t have Tiger already installed.

I’ll have to check in after a couple of weeks and see if I still hate these things.

Oh, and we swapped the cube for the mini. Life is different. Smaller anyway, and we have less cash.

Patricia at BookLust was flyin’ hi a couple of days ago and posted a cartoon and commentary about her most recent fear-inspired, drug-induced flying experience. Fear-inspired is modifying drug-induced. [Patricia, if you’re reading this skip the next paragraph.]

I like flying, in fact I used to skydive, but last year on a Russian airplane from Havana to Cayo Largo del Sur, I truly thought I was going to meet my end. I should have known when the booking agent asked if I was British. Apparently Brits are not allowed to fly on rusty Russian aircraft. Canadians? We’re cool with that. The 2 stewards sat on a metal folding chair at the back of the plane during take off. Well, one sat on the chair, the other sat on the lap of the chair-sitter. Twenty minutes into the flight the entire cabin filled with smoke. The stewards passed around candies. As one of 3 English-speakers on the flight, I tried to ascertain whether we were going to die. I speak ok Spanish, but the only answer I could get was don’t worry. The Italians looked worried, and the Germans were looking for the Emergency Exits. I practiced the crash position and my Hail Mary–I figured we were in a Catholic country, it couldn’t be bad to send a memo up to Himself. Turns out it was a malfunctioning air conditioner and I had to get back on for the return flight 8 hours later.

I had an English professor once who hated flying. His theory was that the human body was not meant to fly, and that airports use clever devices so that the body doesn’t know it’s going in the air. For example, you walk down a corridor, sit in a lounge, walk down another corridor and sit in the plane. You don’t really see the plane unless you purposely look out the window. There’s a baggie around the end of the corridor and the door of the plane–look, you’re not going anywhere, just down a different corridor.

“But,” he’d say. “The body knows.”

Yesterday was a big day for the sponsorship scandal. Its first convicted criminal. 18 counts of fraud, 3 withdrawn. Ottawa defrauded of $1.5-million.

The interesting thing is that the Globe and Mail notes “making financial amends won’t necessarily mean that he [Coffin] will stay out of jail.” I’m particularly curious about the “necessarily”. Is that an option? You can buy your way out of criminal status these days?

Here’s a list of conveniently appropriate Latin phrases for yesterday’s political news:
caveat emptor: let the buyer beware
in flagrante delicto: in the act of commiting a crime
persona non grata: an unwelcome person
post mortem: after death
pro bono: done without charge
quid pro quo: something for something
vox populi: the voice of the people

Reclaim your Latin. Try out a phrase.

Whenever I’m a little busy, I lose things. First my mind goes, then the physical things around me go. I don’t know where they go. If I did, they wouldn’t be lost. So for me the human factor and car keys is just one example of how I’m failing to keep things together: like my hands on my car keys.

Last night I was listening to Kim Vicente on CBC talking about his book The Human Factor: Revolutionizing the Way We Live With Technology.

I was in the car, which meant I’d found my car keys. Vicente was talking about how technology fails us. For example, car dashboards on BMWs that allow you to check the oil from inside the car but not in any sort of intuitive way.

Vicente also mentioned ways technology is fixing usability problems. For example, did you ever notice that your car key is symmetrical? You can put it in upside down. It works. I never gave that a second thought, of course when something doesn’t work, I give it a lot of thought.

Do you have any good examples of quiet technology saving the day, or examples of technology wrecking havoc. Mmmm havoc. I can feel myself returning to my nature state.

I mentioned in an early post that I had some things to say on the occult. Now I mean occult in the traditional sense, secret or hidden, not the popular notion of occult as something supernatural. Although I promise this is equally magical.

Frank Albo was on CBC radio last Monday talking about his research on the Manitoba Legislature as a model for King Solomon’s Temple. I watched him on CTV’s morning news show a couple of months ago, and every time I hear him speak I’m more and more fascinated with the provincial legislature where I grew up.

The Manitoba Leg is a beautiful building. It looks like a temple, there’s a golden boy on top, the main entrance has a huge staircase that is flanked by two large buffalo. The hallways have little alcoves with marble statues. And, now I’ve learned that there are occult symbols throughout the building.

As an aside–but not really, Winnipeg is pretty much the geographical centre of North America, and the building is sited geographically true north, south, west and east.†For those Da Vinci Code fans, you know that temples and sacred sites are typically found along meridian lines or on other geographically significant points.

The Golden Boy was recently restored to his very shiny golden state. According to Albo, the Golden Boy is Hermes, who represents travel and trade and is the patron of Freemasonry. Ok, nothing occulty about that. The Golden Boy is in plain view. Winnipeg was the gateway to the West. Travel and trade with the grain exchange … so what.

Oh, there are two sphinxes up there as well, and they happen to bear the inscription of the Sun God. And?

Let’s go to the buffalo for a clue. Apparently in temple architecture, the entrance was guarded by horned bulls that warded off evil. Hey ho, we’ve got two horned buffalo at the grand staircase. Objects the masons would have understood to sanctify or ward of evil intent in temples of justice. But to ward off the evil, they need the power of the sun–the positioning of the building allows for shafts of light to enter the room as the sun passes over the sky.

There’s a huge number of symbols and interesting proportions in the building. The whole thing–from the top of the Golden Boy to the bottom of the building–is built according to the Golden Mean, which by the way, is also used in fine book design.

More to come, but in the meantime, have a look at some photos of the interior.

Most important, check out the entrance.

BUSY Busy goes back to an Old English bisig, which also meant “occupied.” Apart from Dutch bezig, it has no apparent relatives in any Indo-European language, and it is not known where it came from. The sense “inquisitive,” from which we get busybody, developed in the late 14th century. Business was originally simply a derivative formed from busy by adding the suffix –ness. In Old English it meant “anxiety, uneasiness,” reflecting a sense not recorded for the adjective itself until the 14th century. The modern commercial sense seems to have originated in the 15th century. (The modern formation busyness, reflecting the fact that business can no longer be used simply for “state of being busy,” is 19th-century.) –Bloomsbury Dictionary of Word Origins

When I’m busy, I feel like a less interesting person.

The cogs of witty conversation
are churning away in the background
but only
now
and
then
do I catch the tune.

When I have a min. let me tell you about occultism (ìI know just enough about astrology to be dangerousî). Also, I noticed CBC is talking about the free daily newspapers in Vancouver and the enormous amount of trash they create.

Check out my April 04 post/rant about this on UpInOntario.com.

Quote: Here’s my question for all three papers. Are you using 100% post-consumer recycled paper? Because if you’re not, I have no interest in supporting you.

What’s the print run and circulation of your paper? How many get thrown out each day? Are the leftovers recycled to make the paper for tomorrow’s rag or are they sitting in land fills.

The environment and the corporation can coexist. I’m sure of it, but, boy, the creativity required to deviate from the status quo seems beyond a lot of businesses.

Well, that’s all I’ve got for now. I’ve forgotten my house keys 3 or 4 times in the last 2 days, I’ve lost papers, my mind, forgotten to pick up carpool buddies. Busyness is upon me. I shall try to shake it off.