On the Road

ImpressiveMostImpressive will be going on a weekend hiatus as Clancy and I head up to Rhode Island to attend Kate Singer's pre-college get together party-shindig in Tiverton. However, it may very well be the case that the most interesting part of this trip will be on the way over there. We plan to take a slight 40 mile detour to Waterbury, CT, to see the park affectionately known as Holy Land USA.

Built in the late 1950's, Holy Land USA is an abandonded, full scale 13-square mile replica of Bethelhem and other locales in the Bible. You can read more about it at the Roadside America entry, which is terrifically informative.

We'll also be making a short stop in Providence, RI, to check out the final resting place of H.P. Lovecraft, one of the spookier and cooler of the Industrial Era Sci-Fi/Horror Writers.

Pictures will be forthcoming.

24-Hour LiveBlogging

Mike Sterling (depicted above), wayward singer-songwriter and outspoken advocate for liberty, and I, have recently been enamoured with the idea of blogging, which, undoubtedly, is one of the reasons why ImpressiveMostImpressive has suddenly become active after such a long period of downtime.

In particular, the idea of 24-hour liveblogging seems like a particularly attractive prospect. Essentially, the idea would be that you go to a place, any place, and just sit their blogging contiuously for 24-hours, without sleep. Obviously, an interesting part of this is endurance aspect that makes so many amateur cartoonists flock to the 24-hour comic concept. But more importantly, I think it'd be a pretty shweet thing to just continuously report from a location (a la CNN or FOX news) though not in a battle zone or anything like that.

We'll have to work out the logistics (namely, how are we going to post if we can't pick up a wireless feed or a LAN jack?), but we've been considering trying to do it actually inside some 24-hour store. I think CVS or a Supermarket would be pretty awesome, because you'd get to see all the weird late-nighters wander around, but the crown jewel would definitely be the 24-hour Apple store in NYC. I'll keep you all posted on where this goes...

Pass-Along Story Models

Clancy, a most clever & canny friend of the Umbrella Revolution (shown above), and I have been kicking around recently the idea of putting together a pass-along story. You know, that creative writing activity where someone will write a segment of story and then someone else will write another, and so on, with no particular planning on either participants part.

In doing so, it occured to me that there's actually a number of interesting variations off of the standard "you-write-a-page-I-write-a-page" models that could theoretically lead to quite a number of interesting configurations.

That is to say, the foward progression of the pass-along story assumes that the first page is the first page of the story, though there's not necessarily any reason why that should be the case. The first page of a pass-along story could be a random page from an as-yet unwritten book, in which case the writers could be allowed to insert pages anywhere when it became their turn, which would be ridiculously dynamic and pretty cool.

Alternatively, the free-flow style that engenders might lead to incoherency, so another interesting challange would be for writers to only insert pages before the current page, leading to a "Momento" style construction where the participants would constantly have to anticipate the plot manuvers of their counterparts.

Another fun one, though I'm not sure how plausible it is, is to play the pass-along story game like you would play a game of "ghost." That is, minimize the block of text that can be written per "turn" to a single word. Presumably you'd have to do this sitting down with someone and have a laptop to record the words. Go figure.

omfg ikea sells food products

Perhaps other people were aware of this, but I was really shocked to discover that IKEA, in addition to selling fashionable, workable, low-cost McFurniture, also has a wing that specializes in...Swedish food products, which would be fine, if it wasn't so incongruous. The hot dog advertisement is literally a massive, epic billboard sized banner that is plastered HUGE against one side of the warehouse. And the cooler that holds all the Swedish meatballs, is, oddly enough, positioned right next to the cash registers/checkout lines, like tabloids or mints in supermarkets.

While awesome, I'm not really sure about the rationale behind this. Did some IKEA exec imagine some hardy customer standing in line to purchase their new futon and going, "You know what I could really use right now? I whole package of swedish meatballs."

Buddha Machine

The Buddha Machine: a lil' little hardwired gizmo that plays avant-garde random ambient loops as a concept album. How rocking is that?

http://www.fm3.com.cn/buddhamachine.htm

Pitchfork Review: http://www.pitchforkmedia.com/article/record_review/17998/FM3_The_Buddha_Machine

Super Good Action Squad Idea

My parents, as is their habit, recently purchased a rather sporting looking emergency orange fanny pack, which, when strapped around the waist of a suit-and-tie outfit, looks rather awesome, if I do say so myself. I'm thinking that with a logo and a badge, it'd be really entertaining to ditch class one day and walk around solving problems & doing good deeds to random strangers around town. You'd swoop in when you saw someone having a problem, help them, hand them a random piece of Super Good Action Squad swag (like a button or something), and then, literally, run away with a muttered "swoooosh!"

Theoretically, the fanny pack would contain all sorts of useful little bits and pieces: spare change, a screwdriver, a USB drive, maybe a sandwich for some random hungry person.

Though I'm not really sure what the response would be. I think it'd be about 25% outright paranoia, 25% suspicious glances, and 50% genuine enjoyment.