Scanner : genius

While You Were Sleeping: Teen Faces Prison For Having An Abortion

Brian Fairbanks — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 13:25:00 GMT

A 27-year-old woman is upset that a 63-year-old man has threatened to post nude photos of her on the internet.

Mia Farrow plans to go on a hunger strike to raise awareness of the crisis in Darfur.

This Wal-Mart employee may be the dumbest person alive: he stole a whole bunch of merchandise from the store, then advertised the items as "for sale" on the break room bulletin board.

A Supreme Court ruling from yesterday means police officers may not be able to search your car without a warrant.

A 19-year-old in Australia faces up to 14 years in prison for having an abortion. Of course, it's more complicated than that...

Researchers may have discovered that lice can prevent asthma.

This video proves there is such a thing as too much money in a political campaign.

This genius is in college, double majoring, and maintaining a 3.83 GPA. And he's 12.

And Miss California claims she knew as soon as she answered that gay marriage question that she would lose the competition.

Top 10 Feminist Icons... From A Male (Part One)

Missouri Legislators Try to Create the Crime of "Coercing an Abortion"

The Best of the April Fool's Day Sex News

12-Year-Old Girl Tells Your Uterus What's Up

Jack Kerouac's New Year's Resolutions

Brian Fairbanks — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 18:01:00 GMT

Jack Kerouac is dead, so obviously these are what we call "vintage" rules to live by. (In fact, this coming year will mark the 40th Anniversary of the Beat Generation writer's death, which was due to cirrhosis of the liver.)

And while these chunks of wisdom, taken from his Belief and Technique in Modern Prose (or, at least, the style of rapid-fire modern prose he invented and brought down with him), are geared toward writers, they are words to live by in 2009-- so says us:

Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for your own joy
Submissive to everything, open, listening
Try never get drunk outside your own house
Be in love with your life
Something that you feel will find its own form
Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind
Blow as deep as you want to blow
Write what you want bottomless from bottom of the mind
The unspeakable visions of the individual
No time for poetry but exactly what is
Visionary tics shivering in the chest
In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before you
Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition
Like Proust be an old teahead of time
Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog
The jewel center of interest is the eye within the eye
Write in recollection and amazement for yrself
Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea
Accept loss forever
Believe in the holy contour of life
Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind
Don't think of words when you stop but to see picture better
Keep track of every day the date emblazoned in yr morning
No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language & knowledge
Write for the world to read and see yr exact pictures of it
Bookmovie is the movie in words, the visual American form
In praise of Character in the Bleak inhuman Loneliness
Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better
You're a Genius all the time
Writer-Director of Earthly movies Sponsored & Angeled in Heaven

True, we don't understand half of what he says, but everyone can take a line or two and run with it. The man who once wrote "I want to marry my novels and have short stories for children" would have turned 86 this past year.

Via Wikipedia.

Related:

3 Things We Wish We'd Gotten For Christmas, Or: Scanner Verena Is A Sucker For Infomercials

New Year's Celebrations Lacking Balls

What Do Cubans Really Think of Cuba?

Bob Dylan Sees The Chimes of Freedom Flashing

Brian Fairbanks — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 16:52:00 GMT

He used to not care, but things have changed.

Bob Dylan, who since the early 60s has rarely spoken about politics and almost never about political candidates, yesterday weighed on the election in an impromptu newspaper interview outside his Denmark hotel.

The singer-songwriter, whose last of many "protest" songs was the 1976 classic "Hurricane" (which followed a decade of mostly non-political material), weighed in with his usual round of cryptic metaphors:

Well, you know right now America is in a state of upheaval. Poverty is demoralising. You can't expect people to have the virtue of purity when they are poor.
But we've got this guy out there now who is redefining the nature of politics from the ground up...Barack Obama.
He's redefining what a politician is, so we'll have to see how things play out. Am I hopeful? Yes, I'm hopeful that things might change. Some things are going to have to.
You should always take the best from the past, leave the worst back there and go forward into the future...

For more from this wise old sage and teller of corny jokes on satellite radio: Masters of War, Chimes of Freedom, Hurricane, The Times They Are A-Changin'... and more...

Via The Times of London.

Dr. Drew: "Celebrity Flameouts Modern Equivalent of Human Sacrifice"

Bryan Christian — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 20:51:00 GMT

Anyone else watch Anderson Cooper on the 5th and hear a loud bang during the Britney Spears segment? Yeah... that was the sound of our minds being blown. Forgive our transcripting skills, but here we go!

Anderson Cooper: It's not like she's in the public eye. She hasn't produced anything of note for years.
Dr. Drew Pinsky: She's famous just for fame's sake.
Anderson Cooper: And then it's like, fame for watching her implode.
Dr. Drew Pinsky: Anderson, I'm writing a book about this right now.
Anderson Cooper: Are you really? It's really disturbing.
Dr. Drew Pinsky: It's disturbing, it's fascinating. It's unique to our time, and there are explanations for it.,
Anderson Cooper: To be honest, we debated even doing this story tonight because it sort of feeds into it, but at the same time, she is a major person and it is a horrible development in her life.
Dr. Drew Pinsky: It is something about us and it is not rational. I think it harkens back to very primitive impulses. As we become kind of primitive in our character constructs -- we don't have a lot of stability in our lives, we don't have a lot of stable family systems -- and we tend to do more primitive things... And one of the things we do is to scapegoat people and act out with envy. And that's kind of what we're doing here. It's almost back -- I'm gonna preview my book here -- back to sort of human sacrifice impulses, where you elevate somebody and sacrifice them. That's kind of what we're doing here.

So, guess Adam Corolla really wasn't the brains behind LoveLine. This theory is awesome! It's like Joseph Campbell crossed with FX's Dirt crossed with the end of Apocalypse Now!

Holy smoke, we might actually read a book this year!