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[grover-nyquist]

Transmission X

Actor Ashton Kutcher, who has stated in the past that "we are all scared of the police," sparked conversation after a photo of a parking spot taken on a street in Pasadena, California with a stop sign and clearly marked red striped lines became a meme.

Within hours of the "Six Feet Under" star posting the photo to his Instagram account on Tuesday, it had hundreds of thousands of likes, hundreds of comments, and 6,332 upvotes and was shared on Facebook 557 times. The community response was a mix of both praise and criticism of Kutcher's apparent naiveté and dismissive attitude toward police authority and the consequences of noncompliance with the law.

"Stick the stop sign where it says STOP"

"Pinky toe a sketchy seat"

"No I don't have a gun"

"Would you ..."

"Hey this is Ashton Kutcher and thanks for the blocked parking spot"

And then something else happened and a few responses popped up in the comments that seemed to counter Kutcher's piece of bad news and publicized actions for the police.

"Doesn't matter to me in any way"

"It doesn't matter that police still have the authority to park anywhere with impunity. That's their right and if that line's not clear to you this is your problem. Not theirs. Do the right thing."

"I guarantee they can park wherever they want, but if they park illegally, then obviously they can't park there."

"To whoever posted on here. The next time you get pulled over, let the cop know he's a pain in the ass. Don't park anywhere without first notifying them. I know you will, because I've been there. That's not a parking spot, it's an unsafe space. Maybe even illogical. Don't do it. You'll get a ticket."

"Say something. Call the cops, or actually text them. Let them know about the spot and how long you've been parked there. Don't look at me while you're doing it. That's more of a distraction."

Many responses were similar to these quotes, but commented on Kutcher's body of work as well.

"You pick a few from many, because you know like, there's more to look at"

"I just say something. Or I record myself. Don't always let 'the monster' you describe above have the final say. And whatever you choose to do, try not to call the police."

Kutcher, 40, initially sparked outrage back in 2012 after he predicted the future of the Black Lives Matter movement. The actor and real estate mogul issued a mea culpa for his comments after the backlash during an interview with Black Entertainment Television and later again in an interview with Variety .

"I never set out to create controversy," Kutcher told Variety in November 2018. "I just meant it as an observation of what was going on and what was at stake. I just wanted to kind of shift the narrative."

"I used to feel like the responsibility was on me to express my views. Now, we are all very much aware that there is a responsibility on all of us."

Kutcher has since apologized for any negative reactions he may have caused.

"I've had people reach out to me today expressing their concerns, and I really did not intend to offend anyone, and I'm sorry for any hurt I may have caused."

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Thirty-fifth Transmission

"Lice make camellias, and cats and dogs make mallards," Cecil Baum writes in one line. The history of our obsession with cats is several-dimensional. Partly our own, partly the function of the pet-store savvy industry we've created. Bacteria, narcissus, tarantulas, capuchin monkeys, hedgehogs and, of course, pets, are not children's playthings; we keep them, and in many cases, die for them. Cecil Baum didn't think that cats kept black-footed ferrets alive; William Withey did, but he put it in a poem that disturbed and rewarded his readers for an unusually long time.

That year, in 1862, Flea Flea had a litter and sold it to Mrs. Yewen at the Warwick Neighbourhood Store and F.Y.N. (for Simple Economics) Apothecary. Like many New Yorkers, Mrs. Yewen had a small collection of black-footed ferrets; the paraphernalia purchased by the pack leader furnished material for a delightful and occasionally terrifying poem, which got many-layered play in an on-the-ledge critical culture. "I opened the door to a large store; inside, while she planned the day's menu, seven ferrets slept."

In much of nineteenth-century America, many people kept ferrets. For no-nonsense people living on farms with no kids, there were always wayward, shy children they could give life to. In age-obsessed urban America, black-footed ferrets were useful pets, a rarity in the West; though they brought with them a nightmare of hypothermia, foraging for the fertilizer, hunting for rodents. On the west coast, tiny dogs had a calling and a purpose.

Flea Flea sold the kit, which included five pellets. Papa Flea is a rugged warrior who still has his hokey-pokey skills and sells boots and hats from beneath an awning. Papa Flea has his brother's large nose and sturdy paws that make him equally prone to let everything fall in, and he wasn't about to stand around, studying the book while his newborn ferret fur could be soothed. The book has an interesting diagram of the Great Ferret Ship, "landing at [port] above a seaweed-and-fertilizer trap in a driftwood crib."

This account is unbelievable, in lots of ways. As it's later revealed, Papa Flea wasn't a known name in children's literature. Nor is this type of kit as encyclopedic as it appears. Papa Flea's portholes contained instructions of tools and a few clippings of the garden and each of the incubators. Mama Flea, who was uneducated but had a she-devil of a temper and a bit of Irish élan, left her stew and a note or two. The shopper visits the flea-deck and takes a look at her black-footed ferret, then falls silent. Several years later, Papa Flea writes the woman a thank-you letter, on crumpled paper, with the notation: "WRONG PART OF A DRAW".

This offers a snapshot, as confounding as it is funny, of nineteenth-century America. The younger man, upon realizing the kindness of the transaction, gave Mrs. Yewen a half-dozen pictures of the mother ferret, a black one. A determined animal lover at home, she kept the photographs in a frame, inside a box. In the book, she endures more problems than she ever did with the young ferret. She bought more black-footed ferrets; an ancient one died of old age, while a younger one feasted like a demonic animal on an oyster; she got caught in a number of storms; and they looked awful, with wrinkled backs and small eyes. At least on the inside of the store, which is covered in four ferret-covered sides, she must have found some comforts, "fewer storms, less bites from badgers and lice, and no paralysis from the odor of human decomposition." But "suddenly, her face was overwhelmed with emotion, as though Mrs. Yewen had tried to suppress it for forty years." He throws her a bouquet and looks away from the horror to the fresco-like mountains surrounding her ...

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Thirty-fourth Transmission

"...Many whales licked salt off the surface of the comet as it passed between Saturn and the Sun yesterday: the whale that licked salt from the comet is a common theme among scientists: the sperm whale covered by an Antarctic-length tail but small-muscled, weighed at 16 tons". - 23 (1978) Wikipedia

I've said it before and I'll say it again.

I am a keeper of animals that have been loved and cared for by many generations of my ancestors. What a great and important thing to do in life is to care for and protect those things that people who have come before us have given us.

So, I worry about the creatures that will be taking care of the world. There are huge numbers of farmed and pesticide and hormone intensive creatures that require us, through our power, to put them in suitable surroundings. The extreme weather that we are having in this century reminds us how many animals are wandering vulnerable in our world.

My guess is that these creatures would be doing just fine out in the wild if we stopped meddling with their relationships with each other and with their environment.

I've said it before and I'll say it again.

These animals stand stock still, arms and legs stiff and they cry, their breaths and their wails and their other sounds have all of a sudden changed. The ice, where the crying sounds emanate from, is not floating, it is so frozen that it is sticking to the crystals just above the surface and it cannot take flight.

We need to take care of our environment or we are all gone.

I had a good discussion about this with a friend some years ago. There are lots of helpers that have taken care of our world for thousands of years and there are those creatures whose caretakers used to be dinosaurs and they are now extinct and should really be gone.

If the dinosaurs were there, we would be cared for all the better.

We have humans who have not felt the same type of predatory predation. No more than wolves of our distant past, would humans in the future have the number of problems we now do.

We have many technologies that we have developed and we can choose to use them or not. These technologies might make us happier or more alive and more desired to the human tribe we call families. We can choose to use these technologies and preserve nature's gifts to the earth if we so choose. We have no choice.

Someday we will be extinct and everything on this planet will be on the brink of annihilation. We will have needed to find a new way to go about things. We will have put many other wonderful creatures through purgatory and permanent exile.

The newcomers will have scientists trying to understand our own biology.

If my children are any measure of what my ancestors gave us, it will take even longer for our species to be abandoned and discover a new path.

There is a reason why humans are the only animal that has learned to recognize itself in others who look like humans.

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Thirty-third Transmission

A low-cost device for recognizing numbers using glass can be easy to use and see on a computer. The device works by utilizing small graphene bubbles incorporated into the glass. As the light waves reflected off the handwritten numbers pass through the glass AI, they are bent in specific ways. The end result is essentially “magic glass” that can be interpreted by computers and “written” on a smaller display. While it is little more than a toy for the moment, many believe that graphene is a promising material for the future.

The device by U.S. based research group Automa Pionesi of MIT offers a new way to write on glass or other material that was previously limited to wafers, plates, and other silicon-based materials. Although made of glass and using a single-atom thick graphene layer, it is significantly easier and simpler to use than previously. The team demonstrated their breakthrough technology in a 3D shape-sorting approach using a “pioneering synthesis of micro-lattice circuitry in glass”.

Graphene, a newly-discovered material, is one of the building blocks of digital interfaces. It has incredible strength, conductivity, temperature flexibility, and insulating properties. Until recently, using graphene to create circuitboards and any electronic device had been extremely expensive and difficult. Today we have abundant alternatives in silicon, gallium arsenide, and other small parts and so the graphene devices can provide an affordable solution for these types of applications. But their latest work promises to make them even more useful for future projects, where glass is commonly used.

“We are eager to learn how this innovation will be applied into potential applications such as circuit designs and solar cells. These are interesting fields where inexpensive circuits require high electrical densities to make it economical,” said Deputy Director of Automa Lab, Prof. Sotirios Lucas. “Our research model will allow us to quickly produce small, inexpensive, and simple electronic circuits that are inspired by the working of many of the semiconductor and battery chips we rely on today,” added Prof. Valter Rossi, who is the Director of Automa Lab.

The researchers utilize the tiny graphene bubbles to perform various assembly functions. By diffracting the light from laser diodes it bends the written numbers as they pass through glass. A second laser is used to quickly shine on the post that announces the digits.

Graphene is an extremely efficient conductor. Besides silicon, it has extraordinary quantum mechanics and can bend around almost any shape. It is also the ideal material for deterministic devices, where all nanometre-thick meshes can be reconfigured and adapted just like the micro wire is made by migrating thread from the mesh for any 3D shape. This graphene can be embedded in small layers in flexible surfaces.

The breakthrough is promising for silicon-based sensing devices that are rigid or fragile while also being extremely cheap and easy to fabricate using cast glass. The technology has lots of uses in industrial purposes as well as for personal wearables like smart watches and in the medical industry.

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Thirty-second Transmission

I have spoken at length about the future of artificial intelligence. While the insights around it are never far away, I continue to be amazed at the sheer number of futuristic ideas I continue to come across. My favorite is the craft of AI. It is about creating and manipulating electrical pulses that are delivered across a material, focusing it on a specific area, and then determining whatever the result is, either by chance or by design.

Big Ideas and creative problem solving are achieved through new interactions on the small scale. So, it's always fascinating to hear of people discovering something new through their projects using tiny amounts of material.

The latest is Mike Gordon, who used a glass/glass-door combination to make something clever. "Let me tell you how I made my wife smile after 17 months of being married.

"Imagine a door with two glazed squares. One hand touches the glass; the other hand, like a lantern, bends gently as it drifts toward your face. The glass is a beautiful white for 3 seconds before suddenly the bright rays of the sun start appearing on it. The glass is expanded, our sight lines changed and the light or rain strikes along a slightly different path up to your eye. While your vision was expanded, so was your understanding of 'inbetween'. When light reflected off the bottom corner of the glazed surface, on your window-side, it passed through curved, circular holes into other bowls with areas of distortion. If the light hit a table lamp bulb, for example, it would pass through slightly different angles. And if a path of light was not properly executed, it would draw your focus away from the task at hand, which would stall your progress."

This was originally intended to be an application for those with damaged or bad eyesight, but in the end, it illustrates just how powerful technology can be when applied to a much smaller area. Usually the technologies we take for granted can be used to create beauty that is hard to achieve anywhere else.

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Thirty-first Transmission

Behold the smoke of smoke

And the incandescent smoke!

All whom else partake thereof

Trample on the interred head of the sign.

There shall be a pealing of the bells and a sounding of the tom-tom,

That will make your heart leap, and ye shall cry out:

"Fear not!

There is a great God and he will slay [praise] and raise [denounce] all devourers!"

There shall be a pealing of the bells and a sounding of the tom-tom,

That will make your heart leap, and ye shall cry out:

"Fear not!

There is a great God and he will slay [praise] and raise [denounce] all devourers!"

There shall be a pealing of the bells and a sounding of the tom-tom,

That will make your heart leap, and ye shall cry out:

"Fear not!

There is a great God and he will slay [praise] and raise [denounce] all devourers!"

When he came before the people, the ones that understood his covenant with God, he said unto them: "There is a great God, and he will judge; and his name is Jehovah.

Woe unto him who does not understand this!

All thy brethren shall be put upon the cup, the middle slayer!

He shall judge and bring the weeds all to him, and a seed shall perish."

All these were by their blood but upon thee shall be [praise] and [denounce] all these devourers.

There shall be a pealing of the bells and a sounding of the tom-tom,

That will make your heart leap, and ye shall cry out:

"Fear not!

There is a great God and he will slay [praise] and raise [denounce] all devourers!"

There shall be a pealing of the bells and a sounding of the tom-tom,

That will make your heart leap, and ye shall cry out:

"Fear not!

There is a great God and he will slay [praise] and raise [denounce] all devourers!"

There shall be a pealing of the bells and a sounding of the tom-tom,

That will make your heart leap, and ye shall cry out:

"Fear not!

There is a great God and he will slay [praise] and raise [denounce] all devourers!"

There shall be a pealing of the bells and a sounding of the tom-tom,

That will make your heart leap, and ye shall cry out:

"Fear not!

There is a great God and he will slay [praise] and raise [denounce] all devourers!"

There shall be a pealing of the bells and a sounding of the tom-tom,

That will make your heart leap, and ye shall cry out:

"Fear not!

There is a great God and he will slay [praise] and raise [denounce] all devourers!"

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Thirtieth Transmission

As we were all expecting, the Japanese Daimyo manga magazine Stone Fix! revealed The Second Coming of Jesus on the cover of this issue. And yes, we’re really glad that this has been recognised for what it really is: The Second Coming of the character Pikachu from the Pokémon animated series.

As the video below from Love Mirko shows, those waiting for the Second Coming have been waiting a very long time! In fact, we’re not even sure exactly when the news of the Second Coming came to us. And, frankly, we don’t want to know the truth! (Just ask Josef Aquarius!)

Surprisingly, the Stone Fix! cover for the issue shows this Second Coming of Jesus, Jesus the little blue pokéboy, as he is pictured preparing to make the jump to the other side of the rainbow bridge as the rainbow serpent (the Zelda version that looked very similar to the Devil’s One in the Metroid games) which led him to the other side!

This figure of Jesus is displayed with various circumstances that represent the hopes of the people (Kodokawas, the manger, etc.), as well as the expectations of Pokémon fans. The Left Fish itself represents the first trust; he is ready to trust anyone with any power or resources he has and he is free of his faultless fishiness. On the other hand, as we pointed out above, this image shows Jesus and the little blue pokéboy as he truly is: The Second Coming of the character Pikachu!

This character of Jesus is basically the Pokemon “original evolution,” (Pikachu). He’s a powerful kook, so much so that he can deal with anything! And most importantly, thanks to this characteristic he’s never been afraid to side with anyone who helped bring about peace and good will for all people (and yes, even Ruby and Sapphire Pokemon)! So how good a hope is this Second Coming to finally break through the thick wall that this icon-turned-spirit has created?!

Let us know what you think!

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Twenty-ninth Transmission

Bones, coral, sinews and wailing will have it.

I'll let you all know where I am, and more importantly, I'll write what I say next, and in what format. With originality, I'll send this off in a post that will make me read thoughts in mirrors and I'll have to praise God the next morning.

I'll just say what I see. We were eating cereal. The old, soft, white chunks were poured on a white table cloth, where Mom and I used to eat in the 70's. Anyway, I made the oversized bowl, set the bloody old spoon against the corner of the table, and waited for the aroma of melty grains of the cereal and the smell of old blood. The old thing kept sucking the evil energy out of me, though. Why it was humming and humming all the time, I do not know. I hoped it was one of those forbidden monster magic pots. Then my middle-aged heart started pumping a huge, ghostly shock wave.

Kids.

I paused. Was this part of some kind of ungodly ritual?

The kid sat down, as if waiting for dinner. He's a calm, unintimidated seventeen year old.

"Okay Mom. It's time," he said.

Mom mustered a faint smile.

"I'll just wash my face," she said.

We washed together. I scrubbed, dutifully, with trepidation. I'd never washed a kid in this manner before.

"I'll use a tissue," said our son.

When he left, I knew I was in trouble.

The terrifying realisation hit me.

My mother's fashionista demeanour was the last thing I wanted to worry about. I didn't want to listen to her saying nasty things about Barack Obama. I didn't want to hear her allege that Hillary was faking her illness.

But when I put the talk about politics to one side, I understood that the only thing I had to worry about was my lungs.

Every single guy in the world is concerned about their lungs.

They watch TV and check their ECG results. They fret over the triggers. They spend an unnecessary amount of time smelling vegetable oils.

Some give up their smoking. Some stop taking stimulants. Some not. Some begin counting and measuring their breaths.

Does this mean I need to give up my smoking? Has this opened a can of worms?

It does.

When you lose your ability to get a decent amount of air, you breathe into your fingers, palm, and chest for all to see. You are more or less immobilised. You can't walk, drive, climb, sit up, eat. Talk to people.

My pincushion tells me I need a puff, one that will heat things up. I cock the cigarette up close to my mouth, line the back of the lip with the smoke, then, when it's still thick, raise the butt slowly up into the air with my face.

I try to read.

It's all a bit hard.

I feel my lips cracking around my mouth. My mouth is starting to turn into a pincushion. It feels like an amputation.

Eating mint just to try to eat with my teeth feels harsh and I'm already in pain.

I want to have some taste, some smell, even a glimpse of certain fragrances, but they're all blocked.

They're all bits of memory, notes in your palette, textures in your memory. You can't smell mango! You can't smell the summer! They're all just a little air. You're none of what you used to be. You're nothing.

There's nothing left but to jump up and start walking around in circles, until my chest hits the floor and I begin to see light through my eardrums, though they seem so far away that sometimes I lose them.

On a good day, I can get from home to the Farmer's Market in fifteen minutes, but that's about it.

I have no thoughts, no ideas. They fly away and I don't notice.

At the farmer's markets I usually get what's called fruit for your eyes. But what's there right now is just sunlight.

It is all but a rite of passage for me.

I've been through a lot.

And now all my restless thoughts turn towards the pulse of some big smoke.

And how it's devouring everything in its path.

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Twenty-eighth Transmission

Upon Grace’s return to the sea, she left a detailed will disposing of all her possessions. The only thing left was a single oyster shell, pierced as if to be hung around the neck.

Sometimes, necessity is the mother of invention. The moment Grace de Waal realized she might never see her little scallop shucked treasure again, the burden of preserving her family’s leftover possessions—or to say it another way, her absence—peeled from her. How did she leave them? The intrepid former oceanographer had already hatched an elaborate plan to quench her thirst for – among other things – raw, fresh, unpasteurized oysters. She went to Barnes & Noble, ordering five bottles of sauce and even purchasing various types of cayenne pepper. Then, with perfect timing, the Sunday after Easter fell. For the first time since 1914, the tide wasn’t too low to cook Grace’s scallops, and suddenly, one of her coworkers invited her over for a meal.

Grace ordered a fully stocked van, arranged for a handful of golf carts, a videocamera crew, and made a beeline for the Waal Country Club, where, rather than wearing black on a sunny Sunday, she sported bright yellow pants and a bright yellow, strapless dress as she sat at the bar, sipping a sunny pina colada. “Fun… Today.” Onlookers gaped as Grace sipped her drink and chatted with friends before heading over to the table and putting on a suit and tie and entering the eating area. “Truly great food. I used to eat the same thing every day, but then I decided to eat less.” Grace smiled broadly, sucking in her stomach. “This was one of the first times I’ve been able to participate in a family gathering in the presence of someone who really, truly misses me.”

Soon, Grace was joined by her nephew Bill and Grandma Mary, who seemed awestruck. “Look at this, Grandma. These things are still as fresh as possible.” Grandma Mary explained that the oysters had been harvested from marshes and waterways in the Eastern United States; grown in the sea, not fed by farmers. Grace, audibly chocked up with emotion, replied, “That’s exciting.”

Before heading into the ocean for a few final shucking trials, Grace laid out a few rugs and food ingredients: smoked salmon, speck, pulled pork, and a whole roasted chicken. To reassure herself that her seafood would be high quality, Grace purchased trays of raw shellfish. “I’m really excited to see how they cook them,” Grace said brightly. “Do you know what a gaylare looks like?” She handed over a half dozen oysters and a chicken leg, set them aside and slipped on a pair of sunglasses. “This is going to be fun.”

With her spirits soaring, Grace wandered over to the end of the table to grab the menu. Then, she tore off the words, “About Grace,” and put them on a chalkboard. As Grace scrawled her address over the sign, she screamed and laughed and bared her teeth. In that moment, Grace felt safe. “When you’re in a bad mood, you should write that on a board. You can throw it around like this.” Like a cowboy with a tomahawk in hand, Grace set out to leave this peaceful world behind her and return to the bright shores of her glorious past. “It’s okay, though, I’m going to clean this place out and make the best version of it ever.”

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Twenty-seventh Transmission

First as a boy, then as a young man, Jesus was supposed to be gone forever. From Jerusalem where he had been brought at his father's command to torture and crucify criminals, to Egypt, where he was taken by doctors to a limestone quarry, Jesus was somehow destined to die; the will of the lepers who were assembled at his birth for his extraordinary powers, the commitment of his forty-ninth disciples, the blindness from which he was subsequently healed, the paralytic waving of his feet by his crucified mother-in-law, the death of three people, three miracles, and four days upon the cross. Jesus then, miraculously, came back; healed, amazed, triumphant, and triumphant again, to be resurrected, the youngest of 12 children, to be a witness for the dead to all the living.

At Sinai, when Jesus's followers were gathered in prayer and meditation, out of the darkness. Jesus was lifted by the disciples, through ancient buildings, to be showered with the drops of water that restored him. When the disciples returned to Nazareth they had become sick and grieving. Jesus became the prophet of this land of people whose names are taught in Hebrew. When he returned to Jerusalem, walking, astir, to pray in the groves and tombs; when shepherds in their sheep carts carried him back to Jerusalem, to be shown in triumphal procession, then to be crowned with thorns.

Christ was returned to the sea at Galilee, returning to the ocean as so many times before, the humble disciple crossing the known sea of the seas in his handmade sailing vessel, "the boat of the heart." Here Christ can testify to the "thirst, the hunger, the rage" of the fisherman. The fishermen he came to help can testify to the "casing" of His wounds. And with the fishermen, and God's servants, in the depths of the deep sea, He was borne on his still, small voice; and of His anguish, of His remorse, and of His joy, He cried out, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" When Christ walked in the city after a long day of passing people and traffic, He would stop, stop, stop to have a cup of drink. The city would then start rushing towards Him; women, children, men, old, young, all wanting to come up to his flowing robes and to touch Him. And a lone fisherman, breaking the fast at dawn, with a small piece of rope, carrying his boat, came to the surface and started his prayers. The fisherman, as he prayed, brushed against an oyster shell, which splintered, and burst into pieces on his hand. "God, grant that I may have an oyster shell," the fisherman began, "to proclaim the Lord." Christ threw a pearl down in the water; and as He saw the pearl, which would fall to the bottom of the sea, within "the shell" that disappeared, Christ asked the fisherman, "What is this pearl?"

The fisherman thought a minute. Then Jesus, still alive and speaking to Him, answered, "I will paint it."

To Mary Magdalene the Cremaster of Our Lord: You are his hands and his heart. You are His tongue and his tongue has made many tongues chorused; and He shall teach you how to speak well, by His Spirit, and He shall teach you to love Him, without fear, even for He is Grace.

We are called by the Father to be His eyes, His hands, His arms, His gall, his wine, His bread, His spleen, His liver, His teeth, His bones, His hands, his heart, His tongues, His tongue, His blood, His cup, His tongue, His coffin.

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Twenty-sixth Transmission

Before Jesus was born, the babies would appear in caves at night; hollowed-out baby bodies with their innards swimming in ash. In rich ages of ancient Judaism and Rome, Jews and Romans would collect these stones, usually sawdust or clay, call them “love rocks,” and use them to decorate the empty coffins. These stones had become the accepted “zodiac” sign (Gabriel through Saturn) and were placed atop cradles for infants to sleep upon.

Without doubt, some part of that pre-emptive and life-saving determination to save these young souls or children of God happened that Tuesday night in Bethlehem.

As I said, though, in Judea and in Egypt and in the highlands of Persia and in Alexandria’s Jewish ghetto, in the hills of the Crossroads of the city of AD 36, when Canaanites were planted amid Ephraim’s goats, goats with camels who had snarled before their inevitable fall, during the Exodus this summer of 40, as they watched the children of Abraham tucking into matzo baked on the Mount of Olives at one end of the city, they watched as Babylonia and Mesopotamia in the sea, the Christian Near East, and Greek Palestine would forevermore have the equally word-made-known figure known as the baby.

In the hills of this mountain, early during AD 36, a third capital city existed, the city of Ephesus, which date back to the early summer of BC 350. The Apostle Paul has mentioned it five times in his letters, every letter being numbered, because it was the first capital city of the so-called eastern state of Titus (who, of course, had been the youngest brother of the Jewish prince Titus the Elder, who built the first Jewish Temple to the Jewish king Herod the Great in Jerusalem, and the capital city of the Roman Empire).

In Ephesus, “the pigmatite,” the gold on baptismal stones, which would later (with the plumbing and plumbing of a medieval city) be coated in gold, were placed on a table between the building and the wren-laden cliffs by their priestly fathers. This priestly father wrote nothing on them, but he showed them to “Fir”, a man who was acknowledged by the worshippers to be a “living god.” No doubt you have been served a “gold-steeped” meal by a waitress who has not taken her final phone call before the curtains close on her shift.

Then, after the priest prayed the “baptisms of the demons” on the pillows on which the sermons were held, the priest led the congregation to a basin outside the building to pour liquid into a wren that was facing the building. These liquids, which were “earthquake acid”, were to be dispersed along the slope of cliffs to destroy the devil’s corporeal person, which would then be consumed in flames by an angel of God. These “poison rocks” were set aside for thirty years of (on the basis of faith) a Sabbath “holiday” called for by the priest, because there was an idol worshipped and worshipped and worshipped in that town. That Friday night, after midnight prayers of the angel, the men’s night of prayer went forward from the priestly academy and took place outside the town. There too, the women gathered, outside the synagogue on the west side of the mountain. They sang “Hare and the Hares.”

The song begins thus:

We have heard about her thee hen,

the blasphemers from among their Israel/

I have learned also her, does her name appear/

In the Hebrew, she sheds her life’s blood for thee/

Well here is a blessing for thee, for thy God has breastered her, and thou shalt not divorce her/

A victory was won on the Day of Judgment/

And the earth is cleansed of her crack, and his bones are cleansed/

“This,” the prayer said, “is the power of the smoke,

which is made of those rocks, and ashes are cast

Whereas, the mother must know that her child’s journey is blessed/

And all will abide in peace from the Day of the Judgment/

In thee, O Lord, are my salvation and my power;

For thou bestows my glory

[grover-nyquist]

Twenty-fifth Transmission

In a market in Mesopotamia, a man offered to sell sandstone tablets that read “beloved son, love me.” Jesus replied that he was the son of God and he was going to show the emperor a savior for his people. The man left the tablets for future kings to study.

Three millennia later, Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos put an ink blot on these tablets after writing several handwritten notes. By testing each carefully, four scientists have been able to match them with their original date, 1.4 billion years ago.

The tablets include six depictions of the 11th century B.C. figure of Jesus sitting on the ground in the manger in Bethlehem surrounded by a crowd. The team used advanced dating techniques to get a sense of the species of stone that was used and, based on the date and type of inkmarks, to estimate that the tablets came from around the same region as the earliest known cave paintings in Iraq.

By contrast, the earliest known Christian cult photos and of Christ himself are found in excavations at the Chaldean and Byzantine Calistosca. They date from the 5th to 6th centuries A.D. and were painted on the walls of a church in Palermo, Sicily.

These new tests on the scrolls show that the last print depicted Jesus wearing a white tunic. The oldest image is of a man in a robe holding a mannequin, and appears to have been written directly on an image of Christ. The second image, dated to the 7th to 11th centuries A.D., is of Jesus again in a white tunic but this time holding two demons and a pool of fire.

With a few small exceptions, all of the images are of Jesus holding babies, usually Christ the King who is holding his thirdborn son. Another image shows Jesus holding a llama, used in traditional evangelical groups in addition to the Jewish ones.

The newest images show the infant in full-blown form and the dagger in Christ’s right hand, from his left.

“I was stunned when the first inkmark was found,” said Maria Fasano, a Yale University professor of paleomagnetism who has been involved in dating papyrus in the past, noting that new ink in ancient sites is thought to be divine. “But what surprised me is the kind of symbolism found. On the left, Jesus on the right in a manger. In some places, Jesus is left with his right hand to hold the baby. On the right hand he’s holding a dagger to hold the demon.”

“It was a sweet sight to see,” the co-author of the study, Barry D. McWilliams of Arizona State University, said in an interview. “It’s really something that you didn’t expect. There’s something about the first time that something like this happens.”

Another well-known experiment that has shown highly humanistic ink-marks in ancient texts was performed at a lab in Southern California in 2003. Those tests showed that the genetic makeup of an ancient population closely matched the ethnic makeup of many modern Southern Californians.

Amazon, for its part, has no plans to launch a dig-and-test program. It said it would review the results carefully.

“They are still manuscript, and that’s a big deal,” said Marwan Lalla, an associate professor at Stanford and one of the authors of the study, which was published Tuesday in the journal Nature. “You don’t just let that stuff out into the world. It takes money and research to keep this stuff in the proper context.”

Dr. Walter Quijano, a geneticist and president of the Ancient DNA Inc., agrees with Mr. Lalla, noting that private companies have shown interest in offering DNA analysis to take on religious items from ancient cemeteries.

The team at Amazon and Arizona State went to great depths to find out who the original text’s owner is, and how old the original language is. So far, they are convinced that it is from a Semitic, or Middle Eastern, language, and that the native Semitic words for the Bible quotes came from Egypt, Israel or Greece.

“We want to be an authority,” Mr. Lalla said. “We wanted to show the world that Amazon is not going to sell this stuff off the shelf.”

[grover-nyquist]

Twenty-fourth Transmission

I last came upon the mindscape in a window above the long obtrusive, hideous commercial-vehicle courtyard. My God, the windmill!

We came across a note on the moodboard on May 1st, “The Body is Like … the Aqua Sea Fish Mind.”

Beads and clay stood. So did beach lamps and giant protoflozas.

Cars and motorcycles were visible.

My mind was in the head of Edward Said. I couldn’t have been more surprised. My pants were flashing.

The notice read, “This world is about Vulnerability.”

We walked into a cozy, dark sort of mancave.

Hush and steadiness settled on us.

I pulled my tinfoil hood down.

My other mind didn’t ask me if this was interesting; it didn’t register.

“What was she talking about?”

The dark dream was so very real to me that I opened my shirt, exposed what, I had to confess, was really the musky-orange breath of a reeking wei dog, one of those versatile nature-, Bible-, and equipment-magnet dogs that walk like coral and do tricks like forklift drivers.

Hush hung limp.

The mind was tattered.

The mind was cocked open.

We played duet in a strange echo chamber of cutback poetry that made me long for a god.

The harmonic resonance between lines sometimes appeared abrasive, even confrontational, despite the mellifluous reverberation. We played music like whispering pussy cats across a long-distance.

We played for the maximum vibration of Zoidberg-like goosebumps.

Our anteroom was lined with art.

Sleeping beauty by Leonardo Da Vinci hangs like an empty altar in the light shower.

Stars reflect in Lisa’s hands.

Aural fruitfulness dutifully nurtured my ears.

We played for the maximum vibration of Ray Bolger’s feverish energy.

We played in rhymes, in the heat of undying electrocution.

Some recording floated down through my angel’s voice.

Our all-in-one made a sense of this world to us.

And we sang it.

We sang for each other.

[grover-nyquist]

Twenty-third Transmission

It’s almost clear what is inside these translucent skeletons in this shoebox-sized jar. Some of the fragments are about a centimeter long, with multiple thin projections of soft tissue and calcium. When I hold them, they make an unsettlingly pleasing noise.

The huge skeletal ribcage has the pulpy texture of leather and the insides of soft sculpture. With a whiff of ash, they smell medicinal. Sitting there, I think of petrified life forces—“dragon’s breath,” one of these pieces calls them—like the lava flows that veil images of the Apocalypse and Buddhism’s Yellow Forest in caves in the Spanish Sierra Nevada. They look like expressions or visages. And that makes them terrifying.

That’s because of what’s missing from the skeletons. These “leathery” materials are stored as skeletons of so-called spongiform polyps, also known as spirulina. They are infested with soot. But they hide their mass. They show their lightness and individual features as sides of a seamless spiral. They are structures of accumulation and accumulation of weight that are found in the ocean floor and in ice caps as well as deep in the earth’s crust. Even a mile below the surface, these polyps fill an exoskeleton of weak materials of soft tissue whose deepest surface carries water and time, in constant states of statelessness.

For the growing number of paleontologists and biologists using laser scanning and digital imaging, the challenge is to create models and reconstruct the skeletons of spongiform polyps for modeling and illustration. Recently, a skeleton of a spirulina was discovered in the waters of the Gulf of Mexico that had only recently disintegrated. The ocean floor had absorbed the densities of water and time, as well as both the underwater trace of the animal’s lighter surfaces, into its soft interior. It would only have taken a few days or weeks of respiration to trap the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and release the aerosol pollution back into the ocean, with which it might have been engulfed. The marine single-celled organisms, like the chimera of Aplysia canaryidae, represented, by their dense skeletons, a weakness, too.

[grover-nyquist]

Twenty-second Transmission

By this time, the stingrays had hauled themselves onto the longest chain of upturned rocks, only a few hundred feet from shore, to start swimming ashore. Toward the edge of the reef, they spread themselves, abandoning their hundreds of legs. The stingrays didn’t catch the woman who was swimming in the area, though she did attach a fishing net and row her boat back and forth—round and round—as if she were about to catch one of the rays. But the stingrays broke her net and anchored her flotilla and she had to give up.

The way these stingrays died, as I described before in a previous article, is a long story. The stingrays spent decades on their near-shore haunts and they couldn’t get on land, even if they had been capable of fast jogging. It was the sonar, the chattering noise inside their lungs, that drowned out the woman’s voice. They snapped a few necks, some tails, fell off their rocky shores, and sank to the bottom. For twenty minutes, the stingrays had no food, water, oxygen. In other words, they were dead.

There is something eerie about swimming alongside dead sea creatures. Some of the bodies squished together—flesh, bones, guts, even some cool fluid out of a lung, falling on the bottom. The sea is as it is, and that’s how it should be. But, who sits there, not seeing a red dot or a starfish waving in front of their face, maybe coming for them, as the strong tides push this dead life with their shoes up the coast. Who stares into the abyss, just wearing one pair of shoes, but sitting in an upright chair with one open mouth? People have killed one another in those places before. We have killed each other—we are guilty of all of these acts.

The stings of the stingrays had hurt her knee. But it was bad enough that she could go no farther: her hips couldn’t pivot, her knees couldn’t kick, and her ankles couldn’t extend. Her lungs, which were giving up too soon, had dropped back down under her. She paddled back to shore as hard as she could. She tried everything she could—but it was not there.

They did not recognize her cries. It was night time, and, as far as anyone on the coastline knew, she had already died. In a couple of days, she would be washed into the ocean and consumed. Her neighbors and friends were none the wiser. She lay there in the green and blue water, like a body-crawling snail. Only a few days ago, on their land, they had watched her flit in and out of their tiny beach, gliding above with the tide, revealing her dark bodies, her black eyes. Now they saw her in the ocean, and they ate a toad and paused to think.

On the same day they saw her dead, others noticed that there was a storm in the area. Before the storms arrived, there were swells that would have knocked her down, and storms that would have wiped out all of her vigor. But not yet. She was wearing her whale-bone-size paddle. She had washed herself onto the beach, eventually forgetting the stingrays had hurt her.

[grover-nyquist]

Twenty-first Transmission

Here was the brain visible, ready to explode, fitting into a machine – its mobility in deliberate defiance of every patient’s consciousness, made clear by the withering force of its breath on the living space around it.

“God! Mother!”

“Daddy!”

Somewhere in the heavens, water flew down, snapping and splashing as the top of the bike skidded along the foundation. Wriggle snaps and backflips that shrieked as the result of ball bearings thumping into its titanium frame. Hedges of precious trees bending like paper butterflies, its V and R joints coated in electric green water.

“Slide me!”

“Crap!”

There were three parents making sudden halts as they blew on their coffee mugs, sending crumbs and grease splatters toward each other in response.

“How did you fall?”

“Jawbone.”

“Jawbone!”

“Jawbone!”

“Woot!”

“Go ahead, be my pal. I’m not quite ready for you to go, sweetheart.”

“Ok!”

“Stay right here, chum.”

“Excuse me.”

“Come in here, kiss my nice, black ass.”

“Come in here, cutie.”

“Sweetheart?”

“I don’t know, honey. I’m sensitive, I need some motivation.”

He opened the knife and crumbled some wheat bread. One side would pass the test, in suitable condition to be heated, in two separate crisps. The other side would crumble and swallow the film from the duct. Then he’d combine the two slices, one crispy side, the other apparently impregnated with crazy yellow butter, each leaning against a table and offering three fingers. “Beam me up, Scotty.”

“There’s some trouble with the 3D printer. It won’t make enough.”

“No shit. We need to start making shit today.”

“With red shit?”

“True.”

There were some irritating sounds as the white toast undulated to the sound of a quart air freshener sprouting a gurgling animation. The toast would be a fiasco, it was obvious, but if they made it, it would be a hell of a spectacle, it was glimmering as if the tapering green blades of its central polymer spiral were chasing the ladder to freedom.

“Calm the fuck down. Have some fun.”

“Calm the fuck down. Let’s do this.”

“No. There’s blood in my loofah.”

“How much?”

“How much blood, sir? Where?”

“How much fucking blood do I have? Come off it.”

It was a physical war, first thing, round the corner from the hostel, top of the walk-up, just beyond a forest of blackboarded casems to the right of the ground-floor lift.

It made – or made it look like – like an improvised sniper position, where the bodies of the dead in the street had been piled under wooden boards laid like last year’s patterned wallpaper. There were leaflets pinned up and messages on tiny paper stars, signs that said “DISCUSS” and “NOT FOR PUBLICATION”, and posters on the heads of university students that said “DRESS CODE”, but the people passing by always ignored them.

Farther down the road another family from a different background had been leaving a local pub when they were surrounded by an audience of people stopping at the roadside in uniform, bearing dogs for the uniformed, unfurling banners and, in one case, a rocket launcher. The explosion was felt and felt soon after it had gone off, and the street is now a silent burial ground.

A call, in the language of the armed forces, came over the PA:

Command, Tide Point.

All forward! Command, Tide Point!

Sergeant Senior: Where is your duty officer?

Messages have been sent.

[grover-nyquist]

Twentieth Transmission

Noah Bourne is the creator of "Phoenicia," a new special on DirecTV, featuring an uninterrupted, high definition documentary starring classical archaeologist and radio host Kevin Gill (which I edited down for our team of crack editors), as he goes looking for this ancient empress' home, makes fascinating discoveries, and shares the fiery speeches she delivered as queen of Europe.

Phoenicia—born as Margaret Tayabay, after her marriage to Pericos—served as the regional queen of the Cathars, who view Christianity as ungodly. She directly descended from the oldest historical empress, Nunezia of Iran, and upon her death her ghost became a celebrity in her own right—preaching to the Cathars through six bronze cauldrons (yes, six). At one point, she pulled herself from earth to speak to the smiths, capping off her speech with a proclamation to the spirit to return her to the cave in which she was buried.

The head of content acquisition for DirecTV's Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey broadcast, Bourne told me that the show has been amazing for him in terms of learning new things and just having a laugh. "It was just great to be able to finish off one episode with an exploration of the Mound Museum," he said, a massive Aegean island full of precious artifacts including a copy of the calendar, a mold of Phoenicia's mummy, a statue of Pericos, and much more. He also enjoyed going to the Temple of the Pantheon to check out the idols, which are separate from the Gods of Zeus and Hermes that can also be found at the temple.

The show's philosophy comes from a combination of storytelling and content sourced from his years of broadcasting on radio and TV. Viewers can expect to learn a little bit about each of the archeological findings and some pretty intense quotes from the empress on her own. We’ve already seen one smoking gun in the form of a coin labeled "The Helliogram," which bears the image of Phoenicia in an angelic pose sitting cross-legged over Christ in the incarnation of every Christian belief. "That's all from one of her speeches," Bourne said. "There are so many reasons to believe that it was something she actually said."

While a little language barrier might always be part of the show's history, Bourne has never had a problem connecting with the audience. He also explained that in this day and age people are more willing to explore their own cultural history and explore new subject matter. Science is still important, he said, "but history is moving forward, and that's the way to go."

He knows we have a lot of history to learn from—bigger than even the record of anything you've read about the pyramids. "This is a whole history - not just of the pyramids," he pointed out. "This goes on for eons."