The X-47B, skychief without a human master. Lands on carriers.

so who's accountable? from the L.A. Times.

There are animal-themed invitations, using live puppies and turtles as messengers. There are glow-in-the-dark schemes. One student at Lincoln High School spelled it out in candles: "HC" (homecoming), "yes" and "no." The date blew out her answer (yes).

-From the L.A. Times "A simple 'go to the dance with me?' doesn't cut it anymore."

Buster's five reel masterpiece was set in in the environs of a local movie theater and then migrated to the insides of a fantasy about film while Buster's projectionist dreamed of possibilities beyond 1924: talkies, transubstantiation and magical motorbikes. His onscreen/onscreen detective solves an impossible crime with impossibilities while just onscreen his lost love does the real detective work he's unable to improvise.

Keaton films a 40 second continuous take of a refrigerated railroad escape hatched exit (trap door), then as the train takes off Buster walks opposite the train's direction, he remains centered, leaping between trains, until at the end he simply jumps onto a water chute's chain, grabs it in mid-air and takes it down to the ground, finally awashed in a deluge. He simply gets up and walks away from the camera as a hand-operated car slides into frame with two men, who are then drowned. The take is obviously a masterpiece inside one. Later, in the dream sequence, Buster is lured up a stairs and exits a trap door that's then locked. Then a wide shot from the ground, as Keaton appears above only as the villain slides into a redlight. Keaton comes to the roof's edge, and leaps on an upright railroad crossing gate, and rides it down, right into the villain's rear seat. A mimic of reality's railroad gag.

"Keaton showed us the impossible to show that it was impossible. Distinguishing between life on the screen and life in nature - and for all that, between screen life and stage life - Keaton defined the form as no analyst had before him had done, marking out its liberties and limitations precisely. But not as theory. He made the contradiction visible. Before Buster penetrates the screen in Sherlock, Jr., he must step onto the stage in front of it."

Walter Kerr The Silent Clowns Knopf 1975

Below images: to prove he's inside the film of his dreams, Keaton steps into the dressing mirror without commentary, then (not shown) later he jumps first into a dress he's suddenly wearing, then (illustrated) he leaps impossibly into his assistant. From Silent Clowns.

The challenge for Mayan scholarly studies is simple: what's left to study after thousands of years, continual looting, a gripping moisture the jungle provides and the wars of collapse and then conquests. Many of these polities of Central America were abandoned for centuries, or trafficked rarely. What's survived in written form from the Americas' (it is poorly yet logically claimed) only literate civilization?  Not much, few codices (books of recorded data) and mostly what has survived the jungle in these forms of glyphically rendered stone and baked clay - a predominance of dates and what appears at first simplified deity or lordship worship verses, hymnals. As in most dominant indigenous cultures carefully studied by the explosion of graduate studies in the last century, the language is recorded in somewhat complete dictionaries per 'dialect' through spoken word translation. Although narrative myths exist in spoken Maya, some scattered in ethnographies, only a few complete narratives were recorded at the Spanish conquest, none are in their original written or carved glyphic transmission, and unfortunately thousands upon thousands of Mayan books are lost, a few hundred even burned by a fearful Jesuit as retribution for locals continuing to practice their local religions while also attending mass. Now Dennis Tedlock has achieved what might have seemed impossible only decades ago, he's brought the first study of Mayan literature to a masterful book form.  Although a blight of evidence might have hindered research, it also may have been a proverbial blessing in disguise. Scholars have had to work with pottery and monumental stela, and both have coded, expressive manners of storytelling; since stela, lintels etc. were integrated into sky viewing structures, they offer more complete understandings of the language's use of time and math, even interrelations between phases, and even some unusual keys: differing perceptions in meaning but not gesture, violating, or perhaps liberating them from the closed structure of western languages.  Using available data, some of which he's translated himself (a crucial one - an expansive take on the Popol Vuh), Tedlock incorporates his knowledge by impersonating unconscious strategies of Mayan and pools a vast array of master thinkers like Coe, Marcus, Taube, Marcus, Schele, Stuart, Aveni, B. Tedlock, Rice, Houston, and Kerr and assembles, in piles almost - into their spheres of specialty, translations of key artifacts and styles of writing, utilizing leaps with data they've already hinted at, but Tedlock makes certain overarching leaps: he states naming conventions across boundaries (a use of 'hereafter' that results in several 'eureka's). He shows the Maya possesed powerful storytelling strategies that any culture would could and should explore, both in literate and non-literate ways, and he extols visual specifities exclusive of translation.  He takes an open risk visual evolutions he's spotting are values that travel along a logical route, thus building skeletons of ideas from orchestrated proof. He includes astronomical data to many entries and it boosts his arguments since these chosen stories' shapes clearly expand into the night sky, some are cleverly illustrated with sky views and gradient milky ways including discussions of decaying orbits, spans of sky appearance, the goals of which are astounding once the language's overarching methods seep in (a spoiler that shouldn't be ruined here). A chapter about Mayan graffiti is pivotal, you can sense the literacy of non-royals, non-astronomers, thus the Maya convincingly hint that their language was suffusive, beyond any ideas (or ideals!) of literacy we cling desperately to in the west. This slight chapter even questions Western visual literacy by comparison. Accompanying the juicy textual discoveries are some exquisite visual strategies possible only in book form - the venn between anthropology, archeology and linguistics - connective starscapes, visually-based translations of both layout and deciphered mirroring. Sometimes these illustrations are maybe a bit asutere, but the gravity of shapes and forms in play and the historical correlations are proven (look below for only a hint): and above too, the cover's bare-bones stela-ish design is a preview of things to come inside. And the number he chooses as a timeframe, 2000, shows how unsensual our millenial epochal stopwatches are, how constrictingly dull our calendrical bookends can seem. Tedlock's book should be read by all slightly interested in the past and future of languages, and he's carefully prepared it for anyone without knowledge of the Maya with a run-through introductory chapter of conventional practice in Mayan dating and grammar. Tedlock's book is a time-extended lingual guide and much, much more. A must read.

2000 Years of Mayan Literature, Dennis Tedlock, University of California Press, 2010

A must-read 43 page transcript of Dennis and Barbara Tedlock's unedited interview for the Nova documentary Breaking the Maya Code.

The study of "emotion" in radically non-Western communities - the kind of places in which anthropologists have traditionally worked - throws light both on the nature and functions of emotion (and of the individual emotions) and on the relations of individuals in those places to the historically transmitted ambient forms that constitute their "culture." As the temptation to put the two key terms ("emotion" and "culture") within quotation marks suggest, both terms are problematic, and we will encounter some of the confusions of Alice's croquet game, with both mallets and balls, not to mention wickets, in eccentric motion.

- from Culture Theory: Essays on Mind, Self and Emotion edited by Richard A. Schweder

This staggering book is an archaeologist's view of religion throughout prehistory. Flooded with recent discoveries (2003), the inner and outer of the beginnings of human consciousness can be read in 450 pages. Below: A face-like rock collected by an early hominid some 4.5 million years ago in South Africa. Far Below: A Maori chiefly-feast scaffold, erected to hold food and gifts on its various levels. Evidence exists of similar scaffold structures at Stonehenge. Parallels with the west's Christmas Tree cannot be ignored.

Unlike Karl Mannheim, who saw ideology through a generalized lens, Bruehl viewed ideoloy as a window into archetypes, neurosis and personality; in effect, she saw the breaking down of racism/sexism/ethnicism as a struggle for psychonanlysis to bear. More 20th century front-loading, but still an involving read. There are fairy-tale abstractions in Bruehl's approach to psychonanlysis.

Obama will win the next election, he supports all causes, like Clinton he wields a careful sword in supposedly dangerous times. Mostly though he'll win because he's young, because the United States is in the midst of a growing youth cult, perhaps formless, and his two major opponents are at retirement age (Romney-64/Gingrich-68). Each have had their day, only Reagan's entering office at age 69 would be older than them, and Reagan's late blank-out moments towards the end of his second term could become partisan imagery to scare the bias home. The bias here is age and the times demand an astute, alert chess player on the world stage, with 24/7 concentration skills, something Clinton mastered, and Obama has honed. Its hold on the audience is unconscious and can be perceived ultimately as a fear of death.  George W. was a winner of the age-game with Kerry, but beat a slightly younger Gore in 2000.

In August 2011, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, head of the IMF, potential challenger in the next French elections, was at JFK airport, en route to Germany for a key meeting regarding Greek debt and the saving of the Euro. After his plane was sealed and taxiing for departure, Port Authority Police were requested to stop and detain him by the NYPD. Believing the police had found his missing IMF Blackberry, he was instead accused of rape and returned to NY to face a grand jury. Quickly the case fell apart and now it appears the accuser and the Manhattan D.A.'s office were used in an elaborate trap set by Accor, the French corporation owning the site of the crime, The Sofitel, whose security is managed by one of Nicholas Sarkozy's best friends.

DSK thought that by staying in a French-run establishment it'd be culturally apt to get a blow job from the staff. Now it seems he was the wrong man in the wrong place at the wrong time. Read the hidden time-frame and the strange surveillance decrypt what happened between housekeeper Diallo (5' 10") and Strauss-Kahn (5' 7"). Who was in room 2820? Where is DSK's IMF Blackberry? The beginning of the unravelling...

Edward Jay Epstein's brilliant forensic work in the NYRB.