DDD SUGGESTED READING LIST ~ DEC 11, 2014

1. Are you ready for FOUR-dimensional printers? Yes, that's right... you read correctly. Not those new-fangled THREE-D printers you've been reading about in The Economist and the New York Times, but printers that actually... well... maybe I should let today's first Required Reading entry, this article from DVice.com, do the 'splaining...

2D printing makes things that are flat. 3D printing makes things that have volume. Add in the fourth D, time, and you make things that move. We're not talking about things that can be be moved, but rather, objects that come printed with the capacity to move all by themselves. ... The process is actually not that complicated, and the smart materials aren't even all that smart: all it takes is a material that acts like a sponge that can be layered inside of a joint during the 3D printing process. When the joint is submerged in water, the sponge material expands and the joint bends. Put a bunch of joints together, and you can get a fairly complex self-assembling object, like this cube:

Okay, so I know what you're thinking. Not so impressive. But considering the way DARPA spends your hard-earned tax dollars, I wouldn't be surprised if we eventually find out that they're working on "Four D" micro-bio-mechanical devices that "react" in certain ways when coming into contact with people with certain blood types, or "epidermal melanin levels", if you get where I'm going with this. Get ready for blood-borne microscopic racist death-bots, is basically what I'm saying. I mean, what the Hell else did you think they were going to do with the map of the human genome? They've been working on it since the Swingin' Sixties, so you'd better believe they've made impressive strides.

2. What with hugely popular file-sharing site Pirate Bay being shuttered by Scandinavian authorities last week, you might think The Powers That Be have copyright infringement perpetrators on the run. How then, to explain China's new, massive - and massively illegal - World of Warcraft theme park, which kicked off without a hitch - and without any input from, or payment to, the game's creators -early this year in Changzhou? I mean, just look at this monstrosity! And do you think they paid anyone involved with the Kung Fu Panda series before they chose to make Jack Black their on-site noodle hut's mascot? Seeing as we're talking about a country that "recreated" an entire Swiss mountain village from scratch - copying every building, every street and even giving their copy-village the same name, all without asking first - I fuckin' doubt it.

3. And finally, if you ever wanted to read about how a tantric "sex expert" managed to yoga-fuck her way into a "Tantric Kundalini Awakening" that was so incredibly, terrifyingly intense that it managed to turn her off sex, like, forever, then today is your lucky day! Former BDSM Janet Hardy's essay about stumbling into the horror of ecstasy begins:

My frequent co-author Dossie Easton and I were working on a book called “Radical Ecstasy,” charting what is known in S/M-land as “spirituality”: the transcendent, ecstatic, deeply connected state that may occur during and after a good scene. We were enacting intense S/M scenes with one another and our other partners, and the scenes were often chosen to illuminate some aspect of the manuscript: edgy role-plays designed to tap into both personal and cultural histories of trauma and abuse, as well as intense, prolonged experiences of bondage and pain. They were risky scenes both emotionally and physically, challenging every skill we’d acquired during our combined half-century-plus of experience. In the spirit of research, we added tantra and other quasi-religious practices into the mix and took classes in those, too.

And if that doesn't capture your interest and get you to read further, then why am I even doing these silly lists?!

PARAPOLITICAL CALENDAR FOR MAY 8

Hard Hat Riot of 1970

On this day in 1886, pharmacist John Styth Pemberton first sells a carbonated beverage named Coca-Cola as a patent medicine in his store. Ninety-nine years later, on this day in 1985, the Coca-Cola Company introduces New Coke in one of the most unsuccessful marketing moves of all time... or was it? To this day, rumors persist that the introduction of "New Coke" was nothing more than a diversionary ploy, giving the company a chance to switch out the cane sugar in the classic Coca-Cola recipe for the much cheaper alternative, high fructose corn syrup... which means the classic recipe really did die a sorry death almost 30 years ago. Oh well, at least we "originalists" still have Mexican Coke!

On this day in 1891, Russian-born author, mystic and spear-point of the Theosophical movement Helena Petrovna Blavatsky passes away at the tender age of sixty. In her own time, few would have hazarded a guess as to the tremendous impact her life and work would have on the century to come.

Born on this day in 1911, blues-man Robert Johnson. At some point during his early twenties, Johnson allegedly sold his soul to Satan in exchange for musical virtuosity. With a grand total of twenty-nine songs recorded during a grand total of two sessions, this Mississippi native became the progenitor - via the young working class white men of England who so loved his stuff - of the Blues.  

Thomas Pynchon, one of America's greatest post-war novelists and one of the handful of world-class writers with bona-fide parapolitical credibility, was born in Long Island on this day in 1937. Of his major works, V. is an impressive arrival, The Crying of Lot 49 is a stone hoot, Gravity's Rainbow is an encyclopaedic, mind-bending masterpiece, Vineland is a hippy's delight, Mason & Dixon defies categorization, Against the Day remains mostly unread and Inherent Vice is like The Big Lebowski meets... well... Thomas Pynchon! He remains the only person to ever have a Pulitzer Prize revoked after The Powers That Be decided their panel of judges should never have rewarded such an "unreadable" and "obscene" work of literature. This, of course, was the highest possible compliment those decrepit old fools could have paid it.

On this day in 1970, one of the strangest confrontations in American post-war history takes place in Lower Manhattan when roughly 200 construction workers, allegedly acting on orders from the AFL-CIO, attack a thousand demonstrators protesting the Kent State shootings, the invasion of Cambodia and the Vietnam War. Seventy people are injured and six arrested in the fracas, which was dubbed the Hard Hat Riot by the media of the day. The incident served as a stark underline to the deep, essentially unbridgeable divisions between the Old Left, which was mostly labor-oriented, and the New Left, which focused more intensely on identity politics. This also happens to be one of the main themes in the aforementioned Thomas Pynchon novel Vineland.

On this day in 1980, the World Health Organization announces that the deadly disease of smallpox has been wiped off the face of the Earth… except for a few large boxes of the stuff stored at various bio-weapon labs in the USA and elsewhere, of course.