Motorized hammock

Kes: I like the fact that this uses a PS2 controller and a wheelchair chassis, bu part of me thinks that going anywhere is contradictory to hammock-zen.
http://www.dailybits.com/motorized-hammock-the-ultimate-lazy-guys-mode-of-transpo/

Book reviews: 3 novels set in New Orleans

1. _Prime_ by Poppy Z. Brite (2005)
I love this series about Ricky and G-Man, a gay couple who run a restaurant in New Orleans. It's sort of a mystery but mostly it's just a tangy-sweet novel about these two characters, the people they meet, the food they create, and the pressures two people experience in even the most solid relationships.

2. _New Orleans Mourning_ by Julie Smith (1990)
Skip Langdon is a rookie cop in New Orleans. When Rex, the King of Carnival, is killed, Skip is assigned to investigate New Orleans's most rich and powerful families, the very people who made her feel so alien while she was growing up for not being the petite Southern belle they wanted her to be.

3. _Messiah_ by Andrei Codrescu
If _Stranger in a Strange Land_ had been mugged by Angela Carter's _Wise Children_, this novel could have been the result. Felicity is a young black woman who is determined to make it as a PI in New Orleans, but first she needs to be avenged upon the TV evangelist who stole her grandmother's fortune. Then Felicity discovers an online game in which she can have sex with famous historical figures, some religious scholars halfway around the world let loose a gang of trickster figures to run amok through New Orleans, and did I mention its the apocalypse? This novel may be an exploration of language, narrative, memory, and media, or it may be an extended Dada fairy tale, possibly both, but it's lots of fun and I recommend it highly.

Interview with author of Spacesuit

Alexx sent me this link
http://bldgblog.blogspot.com/2011/04/spacesuit-interview-with-nicholas-de.html
to an interview with Nicholas de Monchaux, the author of _Spacesuit: Fashioning Apollo_, who manages to bring together ideas about cyborgs, fashion, and the built environment.

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de Monchaux: One of the things I find most fascinating about the idea of the spacesuit is that space is actually a very complex and subtle idea. On the
one hand, there is space as an environment outside of the earthly realm, which is inherently hostile to human occupation—and it was actually John Milton
who first coined the term space in that context.

On the other hand, you have the space of the architect—and the space of outer space is actually the opposite of the space of the architect, because it
is a space that humans cannot actually encounter without dying, and so must enter exclusively through a dependence on technological mediation.

Whether it’s the early French balloonists bringing capsules of breathable air with them or it’s the Mongolfier brothers trying to burn sheep dung to keep
their vital airs alive in the early days of ballooning, up to the present day, space is actually defined as an environment to which we cannot be suited—that
is to say, fit. Just like a business suit suits you to have a business meeting with a banker, a spacesuit suits you to enter this environment that is otherwise
inhospitable to human occupation.

From that—the idea of suiting—you also get to the idea of fashion. Of course, this notion of the suited astronaut is an iconic and heroic figure, but there
is actually some irony in that.

For instance, the word cyborg originated in the Apollo program, in a proposal by a psycho-pharmacologist and a cybernetic mathematician who conceived of
this notion that the body itself could be, in their words, reengineered for space. They regarded the prospect of taking an earthly atmosphere with you
into space, inside a capsule or a spacesuit, as very cumbersome and not befitting what they called the evolutionary progress of our triumphal entry into
the inhospitable realm of outer space. The idea of the cyborg, then, is the apotheosis of certain utopian and dystopian ideas about the body and its transformation
by technology, and it has its origins very much in the Apollo program.

But then the actual spacesuit—this 21-layered messy assemblage made by a bra company, using hand-stitched couture techniques—is kind of an anti-hero. It’s
much more embarrassing, of course—it’s made by people who make women’s underwear—but, then, it’s also much more urbane. It’s a complex, multilayered assemblage
that actually recapitulates the messy logic of our own bodies, rather than present us with the singular ideal of a cyborg or the hard, one-piece, military-industrial
suits against which the Playtex suit was always competing.
block quote end