The Space Toast Pages

Matthew Rasmussen's journal of journals on various topics of interest, published here, there or somewhere since 1999.

YouTube Captioning: Hello! Project Egg Interviews

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Ranch House

I need suburbs. I need a ranch house. The suburbs I can build, but I need photographs. I need a ranch house in Boston.

There is one, according to a real estate website. Not far from me, maybe, as the crow flies.

Taking a neighbor friend's camera stranded with me for over a week thanks to a pointless whateverthefuck with her roommate, I set off, round the lake and the roundabouts, and mount the hill. I've soon been walking for half an hour, and the light is slipping away.

This is where the wealthy, if not the superwealthy, live. You could forget you're somewhere between the Arboretum and West Roxbury for a moment and believe you're on a summer colony road on the coast of Maine. Gardens, hedges, slate, brick, and tiny golf green lawns. Sidewalks begin and end at random on the twisting hillside street. Clip off three feet of that decrepit mansion's lawn to complete a sidewalk? He knows the mayor! If he's still alive in there...

I'm not a student anymore. It's been a long time. I'm moving discreetly along streets where people don't walk to visit anyone, snapping pictures occasionally with a manual zoom lens. Should I say I work for a real-estate company if some gel-combed executive dad stomps out and demands to know what the samhill? Tell the truth, that I'm compositing bits and pieces of different photos into backdrops for a virtual film set? Say I'm on a public sidewalk and he can go fuck himself, more likely. You get more of yourself under yourself in your thirties, but you no longer have the endless blind confidence of a college student. It was a long time ago, and you thought the East Indies couldn't be more than three weeks' sail to the west. I must be supremely bored if I'm even wondering about this.

Farther than I expected, but there it is, marked by the real estate sign. A single-floor ranch. Brick. The wrong era. Built into a hillside, and almost entirely obscured by a hedge. Fuck it. Snap. Snap.

Up the hill. Dead end. That sounds good. A few more single level houses, also the wrong era. No era in particular, in fact, unless you call the '80s trying to hide its shame an era.

"I was there, Gandalf. I was there, in the 1980s! I was there when the strength of men failed."

Wend my way around. A different way off the hill. The light is going. Some interesting houses for later - once I've Photoshopped out the trees, hedges, power lines. Why must houses hide themselves away? A latchkey sprinkler erodes a mossy sloped lawn to mud. Old garage doors built into the hillside molder, automobile mausoleums waiting for the final burial of the car. It wasn't the auto that built these suburbs and exurbs in the 1920s, but the light rail, and thermodynamics always win in the end.

That night. Transfer the pictures. Call the girl. Voicemail: I'd like to chat. Text: What's up? Me: Help me run your roommate's camera equipment back up? Her: Did you call her? Me: I want to talk to you, but figured we could do something useful as well. After a while: Will it help if I promise I'm not a vampire?

She comes downstairs, grabs an armful. She says she doesn't have time to talk. Up the stairs. She doesn't appear to be doing anything. Later in the week? I accept.

I'll be shocked if she calls. She's so much like me as a student, putting things off until they go away, avoiding life, covering for her shyness. So much like me now. But I'm sick of the whole thing. I'm sick of being a gentleman. I'm sick of identical "It's not you, it's me" speeches from women with nothing else in common.

Men. Women. The unfinished revolutions. The uncomfortable détentes. The ugly houses, zealously maintained.

"Marboxian" on YouTube

Speaking of film school, a new copy of my award-winning short "Marboxian" is now available on YouTube, in one piece and in crisp 480p resolution. Slightly smaller embed below.

Nicholas Roeg's "Walkabout"

A man drives his son and teenage daughter (credited only as White Girl and White Boy) into the outback, lights the car on fire, tries to shoot them, and caps himself. Young aborigine (Black Boy) finds them, helps them return to civilization. Film.

This isn't a movie that's seen very often anymore, which is a shame.

I actually first saw Walkabout in a film class in high school. We had a video projector on the cyclorama of the school stage jury-rigged into a quasi-cinema. Our teacher, having spent his '60s youth (and met his Kiwi wife) hitchhiking around Australia and New Zealand (in a way very foreign to a '90s teenager) didn't seem to have actually sat down and watched the movie through in some time. Being reminded how risqué it becomes at times, the class could see him squirming, but we wouldn't let him turn it off.

What a remarkable film. It has moments that've stayed with me ever since, through film school and beyond. Interestingly, the current rage that year for us Black Boy/White Girl-aged students had been Aussie Baz Luhrmann's overclocked refresh of Romeo + Juliet. The two might make an interesting double feature.

Animation: "The Gremlin"

An animation loop, for your pleasure. Something to remind me both what I love and hate about doing character animation. Created in Animation:Master and Final Cut.

Does anyone else remember that old "We're gremlins from the Kremlin" Warner Brothers cartoon?

Panorama: The Frog Pond, Boston Common

Boston, MA.

Stitched together in Hugin 0.7.0 from 15 iPhone4 pictures. Mercator projection.

(Please forgive the delay since last posting a panorama. I've shot several, but been unable to produce any usable output with Hugin 2010.4.0 or Hugin 2011.0.1-Beta 2. It may simply be a question of Hugin growing more particular about its input, while my fascination remains the unpredictability inherent in building a panorama up from numerous low-quality images. I've admitted defeat and fallen back to version 0.7.0.)

Super Life: Visual Test #2

From the team that brought you "We Heart Superman"

My Doodle

I like my doodle.

Super Life: Visual Test #1

Feat. Sarah Smith and Christian Hegg

"Before Roe v. Wade"

Linda Greenhouse and Reva B. Siegel's Before Roe v. Wade: Voices That Shaped the Abortion Debate Before the Supreme Court's Ruling suffers from an excess of exegesis. Half again as many primary documents could have been included in the same number of pages if not for the long, often redundant introductory remarks to each entry. It is, never the less, a fascinating snapshot of an era fast dropping out of living (or accurate) memory. Did you know that more Republicans supported abortion decriminalization than Democrats in the late '60s? More Catholics than Protestants? That there were clergy organizations dedicated to helping women to obtain safe clinical abortions?

This was an era when "the pill" was new and relatively dangerous. When it wasn't known that 60-80% of fertilized eggs are rejected by the human body. When a woman would be required by her university to withdraw if she became pregnant, and a woman had no recourse to being fired over a pregnancy. When rape of a woman by her spouse did not exist as a legal concept. It was an era when the social status of an unmarried pregnant woman was vastly lower than it is even today.

A variety of voices and arguments came forth, and I've included a number of passages that struck me below. What I didn't find in Before Roe were a variety of arguments from the opposition to decriminalization. Whether this is a result of the editors' decisions, or an accurate reflection of the intellectual climate I can't say. All counterarguments presented seemed to rest on one unstated major assumption: That at the moment of fusion the egg and sperm cell become the moral equivalent of an adult human being. Here is the most succinct attempt to argue the assertion I could find in the text:

"....NRLC sees no point in belaboring the scientifically obvious. Life begins at conception and for practical medical purposes can be scientifically verified within 14 days. Within three weeks, at a point much before the 'quickening' can be felt by the mother, the fetus manifests a working heart, a nerve system, and a brain different from and independent of the mother in whose womb he resides; the unborn fetus is now a living human being. It is universally agreed that life has begun by the time the mother realizes she is pregnant and asks her doctor to perform an abortion."

On closer reading, the National Right to Life Committee here gives only a definition. But just as the watchful parent deprives the child of less and less of her liberty as she develops, the transition from cell to human being would seem logically to be a gradient, absent some metaphysical concept of Creation. (Logically to me at least, but it is my web page. And I really am trying to understand.)

The passages follow.

***

"We continue to believe that birth control should not be based upon a lottery system; i.e. if your means of control breaks down you lose, and gain a child. After all, if a couple does not desire a child, that should be that. It is not a game. Children are not meant to be a punishment..."

***

"...Women are the passive objects that somehow must be regulated--thalidomide, rape, incest, what have you, you know. What right have they to say? What right has any man to say to any woman: you must bear this child?"

***

"Seventh, the law violates the First Amendment prohibition against laws establishing a religion. This argument refers partly to the role of the Catholic Church in opposing abortion reform, and partly to the broader issue of imposing by law upon a woman a belief about the nature of life that is not necessarily her own. In his senior paper at N.Y.U. Lucas had written: 'If a woman believes that life began in the "prehistoric slime" and is not created but only passed along by conception and that a fetus in early development need not be accorded a right to continue growing within her body, she is nonetheless prohibited from acting freely on that belief.'"

***

"In the 1820s, New York's lawmakers decided to gather the diverse common law provisions into a modern, unified code of law. The commissioners appointed to this task changed the common law regarding abortion, and made abortion before quickening a misdemeanor and abortion [after] quickening a felony, except when necessary to preserve the life of the mother. Means tried to discover why the revisers had changed the common law, and he thinks he has found the reason in a section of the proposed revisions that the Legislature did not adopt: a prohibition against all surgery, unless necessary to save the patient's life.

Based on New York hospital records of those day, before the era of antiseptic surgery, about 30 percent of all serious operations, including abortion, resulted in death. During the same period, the death rate from childbirth was about 2 percent.

...In the United States, the maternal mortality rate, excluding deaths from abortion, is about 23 per 100,000, making abortion statistically almost 8 times safer than a term pregnancy instead of 15 times more dangerous."

***

"Illegal abortions are the single largest cause of maternal death in the United States. The tragedy is compounded by the fact that virtually no deaths result when an abortion is conducted in accordance with proper medical procedures. Tietze and Lewit, in the January 1969 Scientific American state that hundreds of thousands of illegal abortions are done each year. Many authorities believe, however, that the figure should be a million to a million-and-a-half.

Most abortions are done on unwed girls or women who are married and who already have at least one child. It is generally believed that one out of every five pregnancies ends in abortion; that one out of every five women will have an abortion by the time she is 45. Most of the forty-one women who died in New York City as a result of illegal abortions during the last two years were married and left children behind...."

***

"Under the distinguished leadership of retired Court of Appeals Judge Charles W. Froessel, the select committee found that the then existing, 19th-century, near-total prohibition against abortion was fostering hundreds of thousands of illegal and dangerous abortions. It was discriminating against women of modest means who could not afford an abortion haven and the often frightened, unwed, confused young women. It was promoting hypocrisy and, ultimately, human tragedy.

I supported the majority recommendations of the Froessel committee throughout the public debate of this issue extending over three years, until the Legislature acted to reform the state's archaic abortion law. I can see no justification now for repealing this reform and thus condemning hundreds of thousands of women to the dark age once again."

***

"I am Francis Harwood, Assistant Professor of Anthropology. I live in Middletown, Connecticut. I would like to say that a number of speakers today have stressed the control by women over their own bodies. I would be for this entirely. However, it is often out of our hands. I was assaulted and raped six years ago. I was impregnated at that time. I then had to make a decision. I did not want the child. I did not think I could care for it and so I went and obtained an abortion. I had five hundred dollars in my savings, luckily. For those who don't, things can get and be much worse. You go, you put the cash on the barrelhead and it is then done, often without any anesthesia. In my case, the abortionist insisted on further intercourse. This is not something a woman should be subjected to...."

***

"The existence of a woman's constitutional right to such privacy has been set forth by the Supreme Court. Eisenstadt v. Baird (1972); Griswold v. Connecticut (1965). Indeed, Baird may have anticipated the outcome of cases such as this when the Court observed:

'If the right to privacy means anything, it is the right of the individual, married or single, to be free from unwarranted governmental intrusion into matters so fundamentally affecting a person as the decision whether to bear or beget a child.'"

***

"If the fetus survives the period of gestation, it will be born and then become a person entitled to the legal protections of the Constitution. But its capacity to become such a person does not mean that during gestation it is such a person. The unfertilized ovum also has the capacity to become a living human being, but the Constitution does not endow it with rights which the state may protect by interfering with the individual's choice of whether the ovum will be fertilized. Griswold.

***

"It is obvious that the legislative decision forbidding abortions also destroys potential life--that of the pregnant woman--just as a legislative decision to permit abortions destroys potential life. The question then becomes not one of destroying or preserving potential, but one of who shall make the decision. Obviously some decisions are best left to a representative process since individual decisions on medical facilities, wars, or the release of a convict would tend toward the chaotic. It is our contention that the decision on abortion is exactly the opposite. A representative or majority decision making process has led to chaos. Indeed, in the face of two difficult, unresolvable choices--to destroy life potential in either a fetus or its host--the choice can only be left to one of the entities whose potential is threatened.

The above argument is perhaps only another way of stating that when fundamental rights are infringed upon, the State bears the burden of demonstrating a compelling interest for doing so. The question of the life of the fetus versus the woman's right to choose whether she will be the host for that life is incapable of answer through the legislative fact-finding process. Whether one considers the fetus a human being is a problem of definition rather than fact. Given a decision which cannot be reached on the basis of fact, the State must give way to the individual for it can never bear its burden of demonstrating that facts exist which set up a compelling state interest for denying individual rights."

***

"A doctor has a direct, personal, substantial interest for his decision may send him to jail. Not only does the State prevent the physician from making an impartial decision about terminating his patient's pregnancy, it unfairly influences this decision in a shocking way. The State says that only if the physician wrongly decides that the operation is needed to preserve her life is he criminally liable. If he wrongly decided the operation is not needed to preserve her life, he is subject to no criminal penalties. The State of Texas thus requires that all errors in a doctor's evaluation of his patient's need for termination of pregnancy be on the side of her death..."

***

"Certain assumptions must be made and constitutionally accepted to find that there is a basis of rationality to the exclusion of the above-mentioned classes of women from the statute's protection. One is that human-life begins with fertilization of egg by sperm. Another is that this 'life' is equivalent to the life of the woman, and the life-saving exception to the abortion law is a rational balancing of interests by the state, analogous to the laws of self-defense.

It is remarkable that the existence of a one-day-old fetus is to be equaled with the life of a grown woman. The woman is--beyond doubt--a human being, one upon whom other human beings (husbands, children, etc.) depend in a variety of ways essential to the sanctity of the family, and whose impaired health may be critically disruptive to that family; or one who may not have consented to sexual intercourse made felonious by the state, yet who is forced to bear the consequences of that same felonious act. This equivalency of interest between a microscopic embryo and the woman who bears it must be assumed in the Texas law, however, since that statute draws no line, such as viability, as the time to invoke the state's protection."

***

"The religious view that the product of every conception is sacred may not validly be urged by the States as a justification for limiting the exercise of constitutional liberties of all persons to conduct their private lives without unwarranted governmental interference."

***

"Let us assume, for the time being, that the pregnant woman and the fetus she carried within her body have come before the law as equal 'persons.' ...[T]he laws prohibiting and regulating abortion, unlike all other laws in respect of persons, compel this pregnant woman to breathe, process food, and donate blood for the sustenance of another human entity, either fully or partially developed. In no other instance does the law give another human--even a fully developed human--a right to life beyond that which the person himself can sustain."

YouTube Captioning: The Ancient Church (1of3)

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TJueCXNUahw

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Hello folks! Thank you for joining us. I'd like to welcome you all to another fun riff with the YouTube Captioning-

DAH!

If a synth hit that heavy doesn't save you, the '80s hold no salvation for you!

In the Beginning, there was an awkward silence...

WITH '80s LOVE FROM

WILSON PHILLIPS

We are just working Adobe Premier 3.1 here.

The Thomas Haden Story

Ahh. The born-again Baldwin.

"Verily, as ye have done unto the least of these Baldwins, so have ye done unto me" --Celebs 3:41

Yeah? Tea?

Waa hoo raa!

And now ended. Nice going, Sister Celibacy.

"To dissipate. Perhaps nucleate a raindrop."

(By men obviously. We never finish anything.)

Gentrification?

Wherever quality churches are sold!

Before the invention of science, a candle had to be a candle in the darkness. Functional, but lacking in poetry.

"...Voltron style..."

"...and potlatch..."

"...right across from the laundromat."

Among other things.

The ax can't wait until noon?

♬ "...Jesus don't want none/ 'Less you got buns hon..." ♫

And one that claims to be a cheap knockoff. They're weird.

Human nature?

Oh, this is a terrible art gallery.

We're going in, we're going in FULL THROTTLE! That aught to keep those Papists off our tail!

Geez, get a plant 325 A.D.

And coming soon to Copley Square, Cleveland Circle and The Shops of the Prudential!

Is anyone else seeing an upside down cock & balls?

"...loser James..."

*cough* Nepotism! *cough!*

Kinky!

Even the parts that aren't cruel or nonsensical?

God's all wise, he's just not a very clear communicator.

"...It ended in a pie fight."

15 axes? Are we sure none of them were splitting mauls?

#1. Point cannon away from face.

Faith in Santa.

Legionaries wore Birkenstocks?

The mothers didn't trouble their pretty little heads over it.

"...and sculpt ever more elaborate brass dandelions."

"It's still wet."

Count Dooku?

(90 years. Men. Gotta love us.)

                                                    ↑
                                                  Bored sick

"Look, a penny."
"Look, a penny."
"Look, a penny."
"Look, a penny."

Meanwhile, Islam.

"They are as exciting as they sound."

What about the Coptics?

"Jesus! Shut your head off! We're trying to sleep down here."

Just like "Joey" on NBC.

You'd think God would have seen this coming.

1. The unification or trinary nature of the Trinity
2. Godzilla

"...bowl cuts."

Baldwin's voice has a comforting "what the sh*t-ness" to it.

Capped by Space Toast

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