Pilot's Log

Sagittarius Horoscope for week of November 22, 2012

Your redesigned thrust vectoring matrix is finally operational. Love those new nozzles! Moreover, you've managed to purge all the bugs from your cellular tracking pulse, and your high-resolution flux capacitor is retooled and as sexy as a digitally-remastered simulation of your first kiss. You're almost ready for take-off, Sagittarius! The most important task left to do is to realign your future shock absorbers. No more than a week from now, I expect you to be flying high and looking very, very good.

ACK! My leather jacket! I haven't had time to get it repaired!

Another Idea I Have NO WAY To Exploit

The other day, the news had a story about two local high school kids who were using a Kinect to develop orthotics (replacement limbs and other such devices) technology.

I just had a more commercial idea, spurred by a conversation at ps238principal.

In theory a Kinect can be programmed to take your measurements for apparel sizing. This could even be incorporated into a game software so kids can try being fashion designers. But the "killer app" would be with actual clothiers. They could request this data from customers, and then use it to build virtual mannekins upon which to show off their products.

I don't own an Xbox or a Kinect. I don't know their language. I don't know anybody in the programming or games industry. I do know some people in fashion, but they are all low-tech. Where can I take this idea?

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Probably the gray suade/knit cardigan sweater I'm wearing now. It's a strictly in-the-house piece, tho'.

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Nobody has EVER accused me of looking chic. This question FAILS.

On the English-language news from Japan that we get from PBS World channel overday, there was a story about a Singapore department store that was a major influence on Asian fashion culture for years, celebrating a grand opening of a showcase store in its hometown. Since the narrator's English was not particularly easy to listen to, I muted the sound on the TV. Mum took that as a hint to start the conversation, telling about how "Western" the styles are now...

And my reply was that "no, their styles aren't Western...their styles are GLOBAL". Fashion isn't decided in Milan or Paris or Brussels or New York--it's decided EVERYWHERE now. The world's culture is now a melting pot and fashion is one way that it's emerging into its next phase. I mentioned that American culture--in particular, pop culture--is persisting in what has been termed "magical Orientalism"--in which the East (and the Middle-East) is presented as more exotic and mystical than not only it is but more than it possibly could be. Meanwhile, the real Orient has the same smartphones, the same Buick cars, the same social networks and the same television programs that WE do. And life is just as mundane, complicated, and tediously desperate as we have it here. Magic Orientalism could be excused in previous centuries, but not now. (Being the otaku that I am, I've never really put creedence in magical Orientalism--tho' what do you call the NewType phenomenon in comparison?)

As irony would have it, at the same time we watched that TV program, we were sitting down to dinner: our version of Chow Mein, which isn't exactly real Chow Mein but as close as we can manage here in the Tennessee country.

Meanwhile, the area I live in is probably looked at by outsiders through the lenses of Uncle Remus, KFC, Mayberry, The Dukes of Hazzard and old country music records. Do those other cultures see this one as possibly possessing something that may not be here? I guess if they didn't, Sevier County's economy would have never gotten going, eh?

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Other people buy me the lion's share of my clothes. Of what I'm wearing now, the slacks, socks, and shoes are gifts; the shirts and underwear are things I bought myself. I guess my "style" is the attempt to mesh what I want to look like versus the things I have been given.

Hey.

I've had this idea for months now. I wanted Mum to help me with it, but she's too busy with her own projects and so I'd been sitting on it. The problem is, that this is an idea subject to artist subjection, and there are conceivably many ways to accomplish it, so Patenting the idea is right out. Besides, my experience with the headhunters at Davidson has soured me on the idea of making a living from an invention.

And as this idea is too good not to share, I'm making it completely PUBLIC DOMAIN. Me. Stephen Bierce, August 24th 2009.

You see, as good as the reusable shopping bag is, a man on his own will not just carry one. Thus he continues to consume disposable shopping bags just for machismo's sake.

But a man will wear a butch macho muscle vest. Give any man one and he'll wear it, if only to deride his fellow men.

So the idea?--a muscle vest that can also be unfolded at the store to become a reusable shopping bag! The guy can wear it over his usual street clothes whenever he goes shopping, make a show of taking it off in front of the cashier girls, load it up with his purchases and say to the world "I'm a man, and I can carry it off both ways!"

I dare the world of textiles and fashion to pick up this ball and run with it. So there.

Lee Dungarees; Taken at downtown Morristown near the Farmers' Market.

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Comfortable. I can't afford to be fashionable.

Weirdness is like my oxygen sometimes.

Did a lot of shopping today, as the weather was nice and I hated the idea of sitting between two TVs, one showing football and the other showing golf and both of them with the volume a little too loud. Wound up getting four boxes of herbal tea and a couple things for my brother for housewarming/upcoming birthday.

Anyway, I was in a Tuesday Morning discount store and saw a coffee table book on celebs who collect cars. Race cars, luxury cars, rare cars...and one fellow who is into concept cars. He has this machine in his collection:



The Chrysler D'Elegance, built by Ghia in the early Fifties along with other Chrysler concepts and stylewise the father of the VW Karmann Ghia.

Didn't buy the book but perhaps I may go back for it someday. When I got back here I got to looking through pictures of other such concept cars from that and other eras, not just online, but in a book I bought when I was a cashier at a Borders bookstore. One weirdness idea of mine would be to artistically backdate the history of GM's Saturn marque, as if it existed in those decades instead of Oldsmobile or LaSalle or some other brand of the times. Take some features of the current Saturn cars and some features of the Motorama concept cars and some features that production cars had and breed some hybrids.

I'm already thinking up names for spurious cars, mainly based on the moons of the planet Saturn and the Titans of classical mythology, as well as temporal terminology (as Saturn, as the Greek character Cronus, was the master of time).

Moonshine has job security...but I can dream about having a weird car.