Needcom: Market Research for Panhandlers RATE six real panhandlers! SEE, HEAR, and READ their panhandling pitches! VOTE with your virtual wallet and compare your GENEROSITY with the Web average! Don’t miss this exciting opportunity!! …from the clever folks at Weblab.

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The mind is dealing with the world but is always working on itself. The mind takes materials from the world… — Robert J. Lifton There are kinds of information, sometimes bare scraps and bits, that instantly arrange themselves into coherent, easily perceived patterns, and one either acknowledges those patterns, or one does not. For most […]

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The Religious Experience of Philip K. Dick by R. Crumb For Dick, all facts must be dynamited free from the banal, oppressive systems which bind them, and put back into play. For this difficult task, paranoia comes in handy. “I’m out of step. I should yield to reality. I have never yielded to reality. That’s […]

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When arguing about the utility of weblogs with a friend, I was challenged to explain how a disjointed series of postings could constitute a ‘narrative’ in any meaningful sense. Mark Bernstein ventures an explanation… We see narrative everywhere. It’s a primitive urge, a way to tie cause to effect, to convert the complexity of our […]

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Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe (1979)  Gadfly interviews filmmaker Les Blank about his astonishing documentary featuring the German director. There are two sides to the story of how this came about. Herzog claims he made a vow to eat his shoe if Errol Morris ever made a film that got shown at Berkeley. But Errol […]

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