Leonid meteor shower, Marfa, Texas 2008

• ON DARK SKIES AND FALLING STARS
The last time we wrote about a meteor shower here at Arthur, we lived in the middle of the sprawling, light-polluted metropolis of Los Angeles, where the only meteor-like streaks in the sky were the tracer bullets being exchanged between LAPD choppers and some of our gang-banging neighbors. Now we live in Marfa, Texas where we’ll be taking in the Leonid meteor shower — at its peak tomorrow night (that’s November 17) — as it rains across the dark skies of the Trans Pecos from the comfort of our back yard, frosty session brew in hand. Ahhh. Click here and a nerd will tell you where to look for the meteors. [Bad Astronomy/Discover]

• IT WAS HARVEST TIME AGAIN

Speaking of California, it was around this time last year that Arthur columnist Dave Reeves and I were … uh … “camping” on a nearly-destitute drug farm in Northern California. The paranoia, the backwoods misogyny, the nightly “who has the most bullets” shooting contests with the meth-head farmers over the hill … oh the memories. You can read all about it in his story — and look at my pretty, pretty pot pictures on my photo blog — from last year. But did you know that most people don’t have this type of extremely sketched out paranoid experience up on the pot farms? Redheaded Blackbelt writes about some of the less psychotic aspects of growing and trimming with “How long until you earn a million with marijuana and other things you can learn online,” a great jumping-off point for a variety of weed-head shop-talk blogs. And don’t miss the Redhead’s more recent posts, like the one about the time he accidentally sent his kid to school with a memory stick full of marijuana porn. Lotsa nice otter photos there too. [Redheaded Blackbelt]

• BEERS, STEERS AND AFGOOEY SUPER KUSH

Speaking of high quality marijuana, that’s one of the few things that the failed state of California has going for it these days, what with the quasi-decriminalization and all, and it’s definitely something it can hold over the weak produce and harsh sentences here in Texas. Though maybe not for long, as even mainstream Texas magazines are starting to get in line with long-standing Lone Star marijuanauts from Willie Nelson to Gibby Haynes, or at least that’s sure what this “Texas High Ways” (wokka wokka) article from the October Texas Monthly sounds like. [Texas Monthly]

• SPEAKING OF DARK STARS AND FALLING SKIES

We still get email about “Uncle Skullfucker’s Band,” my memoir of spending my high school years as a closet Deadhead, a lot of it looking for pointers on the noisier inheritors of their heavy improvisational legacy, or as Ethan “Howlin Rain/Comets on Fire” Miller put it in a follow-up article, you can listen to a lot of Dead and never “[mistake] it for Fushitsusha, ya know?”

As it happens, audioblog Mutant Sounds just put this thing up that is more or less the ideal entry point for noise-heads that want to “get” the Dead: It’s the Leningrad Psychedelic Blues Machine doing a 21-minute cover of the Dead’s long-form psychedelic masterpiece, “Dark Star.” The Leningrad Psychedelic Blues Machine, of course, is a Japanese noise-blitz apocalypse supergroup including members of Acid Mothers Temple, High Rise, Mainliner and Zeni Geva, and their version is expectedly rough, rugged and raw in what sounds like a tribute to the best of the crackly, fuzzed-out late ’60s audience recordings out there. [Mutant Sounds]

• WHO WANTS A BODY MASSAGE?

Sorry for the long absence. Shortly after arriving here in Texas our pal Lil’ Earl sent us this GI Joe PSAs video from way back in 2006 and it’s pretty much the only thing we look at when we turn the internet on. “Porkchop sandwiches!”

• ACCIDENTAL GUNFIRE AND UNEXPECTED NUDITY: Doug Fine is a journalist who lives on a remote solar-powered ranch somewhere outside of Silver City, New Mexico. The founding of said ranch is chronicled in his sometimes corny but ultimately pretty fascinating book, Farewell, My Subaru. In the years since, Fine has remained almost entirely off-the-grid, save for the digital connectivity by which he maintains his career as a writer, as well as his blog: Dispatches from The Funky Butte Ranch. This has led him to consider how well he would do in a real grid-crash and the ensuing collapse of mainstream civilization that might soon follow in an essay called “In The Year 2049: Would I Survive A Worst-Case Scenario?” How would he mine the perimeter of his compound? Who would make his shoes? It’s especially entertaining to compare the responses of his city-dwelling pals who are all like “you’re nuts everything’s gonna be fine” and his fellow ranchers who are like “that’s a good idea about the mines.” [Dispatches from the Funky Butte Ranch]

• DO YOU EVER PLAN ON EATING OUT IN LOS ANGELES? Pulitzer-Prize winning food critic Jonathan Gold’s “99 Essential LA Restaurants” is a delightful read even if you don’t plan on dining out in Southern California anytime soon: It’s a journey from the obscure meats of Vietnamese strip mall joints to the finest haute cuisine, and as such it’s one of the best impressionistic portraits of what makes Los Angeles such a strange, delicious town. He’s known to compare tacos and noodles to different varieties of cocaine, he follows Spanish-language media in order to keep up with Mexican-American chefs and says things like this about a Korean spot out in Torrance:

We are as jingoistic about fried chicken as the next guy, and we’ve been to dives in Louisiana where the chicken was so good it made a roomful of testosterone-crazed roustabouts weep like your mother’s bridge club that time Steel Magnolias came on TV. But Korean fried chicken really is an evolutionary leap forward — steeped in a cabinet full of spices, saturated with garlic, double-fried to a shattering, thin-skinned snap dramatic enough to wake a sleeping baby in an adjoining room.

The new edition is available this week — this is gonna be the first time we pick up a hard copy of the LA Weekly since, well, Gold’s list from last year — and you can also read it online. [LA Weekly]

• ON BECOMING ONE MORE HORSE’S ASS: After 12 weird years of living in Los Angeles, California, I’m moving to Marfa, Texas early next week. Fitting that the sky above my house in Atwater Village is dominated by a massive plume of smoke rising from a forest fire in the San Gabriel Mountains; it always feels good to commence an exodus under a rain of ash. Chambo’s Internet Activity Pages shall resume upon activation of Arthur’s Marfa Station. [Bobby Bare - "One More Horse's Ass"]

• SPEAKING OF MARFA: Yacht recorded their most recent album, See Mystery Lights, down there in West Texas. They’re giving away copies of the instrumental version over at the Free Music Archive and I am going to be playing it all weekend — along with lots and lots of Doug Sahm — while I load the moving truck. [Free Music Archive]

“Dr. Pek van Andel was a natural choice to investigate how somebody had attached a dried bull’s penis to the Oxford ox.”

• DID YOU KNOW THAT VIDEO IS A PR0N?: This is a scientist-made porno movie called “Magnetic Resonance Imaging of Male and Female Genitals During Coitus and Female Sexual Arousal.” It’s maker, Dr. Pek van Andel, seems to be a deeply pervy researcher who is able to conjure funding so that he can pay people to copulate in an MRI chamber. The narrator suggests that this video is of interest to “specialists,” as well as “laypersons who have an interest in reproductive anatomy” which is, y’know, pretty much everybody with a working pair of ovaries or testes, right? If you really are curious about such things — and not just for onanistic ends — then click here to read the New Scientist article with all the dirty details. And if you’re just watching because this is the sort of thing gets you wet, just wait ’til you check out the totally NSFW X-ray blowjob pics that have been in the top five posts over at Ballardian for the last year solid. HUBBA HUBBA! [New Scientist via The eXiled]

• READING RAINBOWS: When Stephen Beachy was 19, he took some acid and wandered into a “room full of cadavers.” “Whoah,” he said. Beachy colors his micro-reviews of “12 hallucinogenic novels and 8 inebriated memory pieces” with plenty more such anecdotes, guiding the lysergically-minded reader through canonical works from P.K. Dick and Burroughs, along with underexposed masterpieces; my personal favorite being Denis Johnson’s oft-maligned psychedelic California noir, Already Dead. [SFBG]

• TOO HIGH ON A MOUTAINTOP: Look, just to get this out of the way right off: The guys and gals that sit in trees with, like, a bowl of oatmeal and a hacky sack and manage to stop burly fuckers in bulldozers with giant bags full of explosives from BLOWING THE BRAINS OUT OF MOUNTAINS across Appalachia are H-E-R-O-E-S. Of all time. True heroes. Build a statue and we should all lay flowers down in front of it until the end of days. Click here to go read about all of their laudable activities in Grist.

But when they put their video up and it’s them sitting in a tree in West Virgina with hyper-earnest folk music about “grandaddy workin’ in da mountains/unlike the ’splosion miners of 2day” it sucks all the swagger out of the thing. I understand why these fighters can’t go up there with shotguns and just cap anybody who thinks it’s a good idea to “remove” a mountain, but at least they could score it with jams that sound a little more, I dunno, aggravated. Next time let’s make one of these videos with Lightning Bolt or something like Wolves in the Throne Room’s “Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog” or maybe “Hate Crystal” if you still want to keep some of the crusty vibrations. Otherwise you’re unnecessarily wimping it up in front of the whole group. Like Jensen says, “this is war.” [Grist]

• BOIL ME UP SOME BACON AND SOME BEANS: “I never knew baked beans could be such a triumph, such a prayer, such a song,” says Pioneer Woman in her introduction to this recipe for “Best Baked Beans Ever.” What is the secret of these tasty beans? “Start with eight slices of bacon …” and it just goes from there. [The Pioneer Woman via Serious Eats]

• FRESH HEADERS: Aren’t those new Arthur headers sweeet? [Into the Green]

• AWESOME MAPS FROM AFRICA: The dirt scientists at GlobalSoilMap.net are making maps of all the dirts of all the world, and Africa is just the beginning. The landscape architecture obsessives over at Pruned offer up some interesting analysis of a variety of soil maps of African countries, looking at the crossover between “these beautiful abstractions of geology” and the politics of agriculture that are inextricably linked to soil quality. E.g. in vintage maps of Zimbabwe nee Rhodesia, you can find the white population firmly ensconced on the finest dirt. We want to see a soil map of Tim Dundon’s Doo-Doo Manor next! [Pruned]

• TASTY FISH OR DEADLY FISH: Are you looking for new ways to police the eating habits of your pals in public? Who isn’t, is more like it! The Monterey Bay Aquarium has been producing a guide for responsible fish-eaters for awhile now — you’ll oft see them taped to refrigerators in “conscious” pseudo-vegetarian households — and they’ve now ported these guides into a mobile-phone friendly version. There’s also the requisite “iPhone app” if you’re into those exploding Macintosh pocket computers. [via The Vigorous North]

• ATTN CONQUERING LIONS: If you ever have a sudden urge to replenish your digital library with fresh reggae tunes, You & Me On A Jamboree is the website to hit up. These Brazilian bredren have posted literally hundreds of classic out-of-print JA jams, adding more rocksteady, dub and roots albums nearly every day. Our most recent favorite is this super sexy 20 Reggae Disco Hits thing, by which they don’t so much mean “disco” as “righteous pop sweatiness.” It’s a vinyl rip and we kinda love hearing the dusty crackle underneath the super chill covers of “Angel of the Morning” and original rockers from a couple people we’ve heard of (Ethiopians, Gregory Isaacs) and a bunch of dudes and ladies that are totally new to our ears. [Y&M]

• HOT TOWN, SUMMER IN THE CITY SUCKS: Anthropogenic climate change is bad for everyone, but you’re especially fucked if you’re poor or old and you live in the city. So says a new report from the National Wildlife Federation and Physicians for Social Responsibility, via Scientific American:

The report says urban areas, with their asphalt and concrete, are as much as 10 degrees hotter than more rural regions.

More than 3,400 people died in the United States from exposure to excessive heat between 1999 and 2003, the study states, adding that heat accounts for more weather-related deaths than any other single source.

All the more reason to get yourself some of that country air if you can, forest air in particular seems to be the way to go. [Scientific American]

• SPEAKING OF OLD PEOPLE: They say wise and funny shit sometimes: “The dog don’t like you planting stuff there. It’s his backyard. If you’re the only one who shits in something, you own it. Remember that.” [Shit My Dad Says via Harper's]

• GREAT BALLS OF FIRE: Did you miss the Perseid meteor shower peak-hour blowout that happened back on August 12? We went camping up on Mount Pacifico here in the Southern CA San Gabriels the weekend after and caught a couple fleeting shooting stars, but the main event was completely obscured by the impenetrable orange-grey dome that covers the Los Angeles sky each night. Luckily this “Jeff Sullivan” guy on Flickr recorded a good portion of the night with his HD camera. [via Bad Astronomy/Discover]

• PACIFIC SCI-FI: We are slowly working our way through Simon Sellars most recent contribution to Ballardian, a website “exploring tropes and motifs found in the work of J.G. Ballard.” Sellars’ essay — “Extreme Possibilities: Mapping “the sea of time and space” in J.G. Ballard’s Pacific fictions” — is an in-depth look at themes of dystopia/utopia in works such as “My Dream of Flying to Wake Island” and Rushing to Paradise, tales set on uninhabited Pacific islands. Sellars brings anarchist philosopher-poet Hakim Bey (aka Peter Lamborn Wilson) and literary critic Fredric Jameson into the discussion, along with a variety of photographs and video documenting the nuclear testing that gives much of these works their apocalyptic tint. [Ballardian]

• TO DEET OR NOT TO DEET: Last week a bunch of people picked up the story that the noxious insect repelling chemical was maybe bad for you, as in neurotoxically bad. O RLY? That shit melts plastic and “stained” the frames of my spectacles — of course it’s bad for you. But you know what else I think is bad for me? Having mosquitos and no-see-ums eating my eyeballs alive when I’m up in Tahoe, exploring high altitude bogs in the Desolation Wilderness. And also BUG GIRL says that maybe these studies aren’t that useful anyway: “The results in this paper are preliminary, need to be confirmed, and even IF confirmed, remain irrelevant to the average person who might want to use DEET.” Whatever: DEET ‘em if you got ‘em, I guess. Or better yet let’s see what NANCE has to say about hexing them skeeters … [Bug Girl's Blog]

• ON YARD EGGS AND CITY CHICKENS: The urban homesteaders at Homegrown Evolution are talking chicken at their newly launched L.A. Urban Chicken Enthusiasts online forum. And if you’ve got an extra 20 bucks burning a hole in your pocket, you can go hang out with them at Project Butterfly in downtown Los Angeles TODAY (that’s Tuesday, August 25, 2009) and they’ll teach you how to make sauerkraut and a “self-irrigating pot.” [Homegrown Evolution]

• AFRO SCI-FI: Sci-fi author Nnedi Okorafor is talking with all of her pals about whether or not “Africa is ready for science fiction” as a guest-blogger on the Nebula Awards website and it’s chock full of clever anecdotes about creating sci-fi that appeals to non-Western audiences. As Notre Dame professor Naunihal Singh puts it, “Bring the Terminator to West Africa, and he’d stop running in a day. He’d sit there and glitch. It’ll be hard to make people afraid of a future where computers take over the world when they can’t manage to keep the computers on their desk running.” There’s also lots of great jumping off points for exploring other African sci-fi writers and absolutely bonkers-looking Nollywood B-movies like Across The Bridge; that’s the trailer up top there, sample line: “Are you willing to suck the breast of ever-flowing milk?” [Nebula Awards via Harper's]

• ATTN NEW WELFARE QUEENS: If you spend a lot of time reading Rushkoff’s commentary here in Arthur on the current death throes of American laissez faire capitalism, you probably know that when the unemployment numbers go down it’s often ’cause people STOP looking for work, rather than b/c they got jobs. But that doesn’t matter right now, ’cause “California’s jobless rate reached a fresh post-World War II high in July, climbing to 11.9%,” as the LA Times reported last week. WELCOME TO THE AMERICAN DOLE, you deadbeats. Here’s a great blog that’ll show all you n00b unemployees how to work it: UNEMPLOYMENTALITY has all the tips, tricks and hacks you’ll need to navigate California’s EDD. E.g. If you’d like to quickly bypass the robots and talk to one of the live drones, call the Vietnamese language line. BRILLIANT. [Unemploymentalitiy]

• MORE LIGHTNING BOLT NEWS: Did you know that lighting sometimes strikes up? See images of a “gigantic jet of upside down lightning” over at the Nature blog. [The Great Beyond]

• MINIMALIST CHRONICLES OF WESTERN DECADENCE: Do you guys read Texts From Last Night? It is a website where American exhibitionists offer up short form narratives about their bad trips, pregnancy scares and a super gross thing called “sharting.” On the one hand it’s as dumb a time-waster as LOLCats, but on the other it is like Ayman Al Zawahiri’s darkest fantasies of Western Decadence rendered in minimalist text-messaging prose, the area code from whence said texts were typed being the only identifying detail. [TFLN]

(813): I think dad’s getting high again. His last google search was “awesome ping pong shit.”

(323): The idiot babysitter thought my dildo was a teething toy and gave it to our child.
(1-323): Did you put it in the freezer again?

• AWESOME PING PONG SHIT: As it happens, that “high dad” had the right idea, Googling “awesome ping pong shit.” Case in point, the John McEnroe-caliber table tennis antics seen below:

• MORE AWESOME TAPES (AND 7-INCHES) FROM AFRICA: Frank lived in West Africa from 2005 to 2008, and he tells us all about it at Voodoo Funk, a collection of stories, MP3s and awesome record store art. He’s also DJing a “Lagos Disco Inferno” party this weekend in Brooklyn, and you can get a preview of the heavy grooves from his crates with this kinda sloppy and totally delightful downloadable mix. [Voodoo Funk]

• MEXICAN JOURNALISM 101: Tucson-based writer Charles Bowden is by far the best guy when it comes to reading about drugs and Mexico, partly because in Mexico you are not allowed to write about drugs and Mexico. In last month’s Mother Jones he wrote this terrifying story of a reporter who wasn’t even trying to do that, but Mexican Army psychopaths decided to try and kill him anyway. He fled to the United States looking for asylum so we put him in jail and took his kid away. [Mother Jones]

• CHILEAN ELECTRONICS: Arthur pal Raspberry Jones is adding a bunch of tunes to Newly Lost Edge, including some interesting electronic music from South America. Jones is a regular go-to guy when it comes to this stuff, helpfully directing our attention to mixes such as this one from Matias Aguayo, a Chilean dude “putting on his various friends from around the world – artists from Argentina, Mexico, Colombia, Cape Verde, etc. – who aren’t just doing the local thing, so much as mixing that local thing with a (for lack of a better term) minimal techno vibe.” [Newly Lost Edge]

• ENDGAME TIME AGAIN: The Guardian UK joins the Financial Times in shoring up the British mainstream press’ reputation as a hub for radical anarcho-primitivist thought, following the Jared Diamond interview we wrote about last week with this pleasantly archaic exchange of letters between two dudes, one of whom is like “The writing is on the wall for industrial society, and no amount of ethical shopping or determined protesting is going to change that now” and another guy who’s like, “you’re just horny for the apocalypse.” [The Guardian]

• NEW ANIMALS: Did you see the new animals yet? World Wide Fund for Nature has all kinds of information about the 350 different species of plants, amphibians, reptiles, fish, birds, mammals and invertebrates that humans have recently discovered hiding out in the Eastern Himalayas (so not exactly “new,” so much as “new to us”). Including this flying frog that glides around from tree-to-tree with its webbed feet. That guy is most likely on the anti-industrial society side of the debate. [WWF via Science Daily]

P.S. Happy Birthday Joe Strummer! You can read Kristine McKenna’s beautifully sprawling Q&A with the dearly departed Clash frontman and all around inspirational hero from Arthur 3 (March 2003) by clicking here. We’ve also got plenty of hard copies left in the Arthur Store. Click here to go see about that.