So. Upon taking a break around midnight I decided to unwind with a bit of ye old Entertainment. The hows and the whys escape me--the interwebs, like a magical forest, tend to lead to many unsettling discoveries--but I stumbled upon this little... gem, the website for the Montana Meth Project. Warning: The videos and the ads aren't exactly for the faint of heart. The blurb on the site sums it all up pretty nicely, 70-90% of teens in Montana are supposedly seeing these about three times a week--saturation-level advertising they're calling it. The ads themselves are... well... abhorrently grotesque. Like the Nunhagen-Aspirin ads, but there's nothing remotely artistic or what have you about this. "Not even once" is the general theme...

The medical attache's introduction, for example, as he's unwinding after work. Barring the subjugation of his wife, it's all a bit... glorious, albeit hyperbolic and (just a little) grotesque. An entertainment system that takes all the guesswork out of being entertained... anyone who's tried Pandora or even Itunes' Party shuffle is already familiar with "the procedures for ordering specific spontaneous pulses." Specific spontaneity... the idea just sounds so... nice, catering to our need for diversity or whatever but not frightening us with anything too "new"--I can handle Nirvana, and a taste of Alice in Chains, but throw Against Me or something a bit more "contemporary" into the mix and I'll panic. Or unrecordable InterLace pulse messages, single-play ROM (read only memory) self-erasing discs... yeah, we've all done the DRM thing. Initially, I was absorbed into the idea that we're delving into an alternate history / alternate reality or something. But with every page it feels a lot more like the right here and the right now, and someone's swapped my rose-tinted lenses with magnifying bifocals. Maybe Coca-Cola isn't outright sponsoring an entire year (and hopefully Depend Undergarments never will) but can we really go a day without seeing their products?

Or did the Cold War ever really end? This was supposed to be a comment on potted plant's post and it got a wee bit too lengthy...

With the rise of mass communication the average joe/jane is suddenly flooded with a wealth of information--but who's running the show? Technology certainly is a double-edged sword, but I get the feeling the hysteria is born out of a desperate need to absorb all the information that we can--strictly because we can--without the means to really "handle" it, per se. I'm thinking about the images post-September 11th: explosions, people united under the flag, firefighters and police officers covered in soot and the like, solidarity, etcetera... And then i'm thinking about sitting in English class that morning, when the proverbial shit hit the proverbial fan. The cellphone circuits were jammed, everyone calling everyone else once panic mode sets in, so like good young rubber-neckers we snuck out of school and drove down to the Brooklyn Promenade, overlooking the Lower Manhattan skyline.

A-and we’re done. Hrmm. As i'm merely positing theories and the like, the following should be taken with a grain or two of salt (though i've never actually figured out what that means [either]).

Beyond the Zero. It's the title of the first section of the novel, and naturally should bear some importance. There's Absolute Zero, the point at which there is a complete lack of molecular motion, a complete and utter lack of "progress" that everyone (who? Them?) seems to be gunning for. But what is this Absolute Zero? Or Zero, for that matter... Well, i've some ideas on the notion of Absolute Zero being implemented as maybe some kind of maintenance of the "status quo" (which in turn leads me down a slippery slope on the nature of Bureaucracy, who's actually in charge of what, effective leadership through the obscurity of, etc) but as I haven't really figured that out yet i'll file that in the "Maybe" pile. On to the Zero...The OED defines Zero as the arithmetical figure which denotes "nought." So, zero means nothing, fair enough. But what exactly is "Beyond" nothing? Well....