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Lyle Zapato

Obsoletias

Lyle Zapato | 2022-11-24.0320 LMT | Retro | Random Found Thing | Art
I met a customer from a Goodwill store,
Who said: A desktop computer of beige
Sits on the back shelf. On it, o'er a door,
A sticker stuck still advertised: storage,
And fax modem, and Intel processor;
Tells that its maker well those features met
Which yet survive, ready for lifeless screens,
The four-gig hard-drive, and micro diskette;
And on the bay coverplate, these words entreat:
"etower 500is, eMachines;
This computer is NEVER OBSOLETE!"
No one around exclaims. Late on Monday
In dusty store it stays, tower discrete,
Priced with orange tag; the sale ends today.
Lyle Zapato

The Secret Of Apergy, Gravity's Second Phase

Lyle Zapato | 2020-06-03.7850 LMT | Antigravity | Retro | General Paranoia | Elephants

What if I told you the secret of antigravity was revealed to the public in seemingly specific technical detail in a newspaper article over 120 years ago, only no one noticed or remembered?

On January 17, 1897, a science correspondent for The San Francisco Call recounted his visit with a peculiar foreigner who was keeping a secret:

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Lyle Zapato

NASA's Marsbee Proposal

Lyle Zapato | 2018-04-07.6120 LMT | Paraterrestrials | Simulacra

In his 1950 book, The Riddle Of The Flying Saucers (previously blogged here), Gerald Heard argued, using an inexorable chain of logic based on the available evidence, that the then-newly-reported phenomena of "flying saucers" were actually vehicles from Mars piloted by super-intelligent Martian bees, come to Earth to observe Humanity and possibly warn us of our impending doom.


Marsbees observing Earth (from Brisbane Telegraph serialization of Riddle).

Most at the time scoffed at this idea. Little green men were one thing, but Marsbees? Nonsense! Even today, Heard's theories are given little credence, or even note, by mainstream Ufologists.

However, Heard may have the last laugh, as NASA has recently announced a new Mars exploration proposal using robotic Marsbees:

The objective of the proposed work is to increase the set of possible exploration and science missions on Mars by investigating thefeasibility of flapping wing aerospace architectures in a Martian environment. The proposed architecture consists of a Mars rover that serves as a mobile base and a swarm of Marsbees. Marsbees are robotic flapping wing flyers of a bumblebee size with cicada sized wings. The Marsbees are integrated with sensors and wireless communication devices. The mobile base can act as a recharging station and main communication center. The swarm of Marsbee can significantly enhance the Mars exploration mission with the following benefits: i) Facilitating reconfigurable sensor networks; ii) Creation of resilient systems; iii) Sample or data collection using single or collaborative Marsbees.

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Lyle Zapato

Weaponized Bees: A Taste For Honey & Black Mirror

Lyle Zapato | 2016-10-26.4120 LMT | Entertainment | Nature | Simulacra | General Paranoia


(Click to enlarge.)

A Taste For Honey (1941) is a murder mystery novel by H. F. Heard, also known as Gerald Heard, whose works I've covered a number of times now.

[Spoiler Alert] Sidney Silchester, a man with a taste for honey, moves to the rural English village of Ashton Clearwater for some peace and quiet. Mysteriously, no one in the district is able to raise bees except for one secretive man, Mr. Heregrove.

A true honey fancier, Silchester won't buy the stuff sold in shops, so he makes arrange­ments with Here­grove's wife to secure a regular supply of real honey, until one day she turns up dead, stung to death by her husband's bees.

With his honey reserves dwindling and hearing that the coroner had ordered Heregrove to destroy his hives, Silchester is forced by his mellivorous appetite to go inquiring about an alternate honey source. He is drawn by a curious sign to the home of a new arrival in Ashton Clearwater, one Mr. Mycroft, who is interested in beekeeping, but only for studying bee psychology, not producing honey.

Mycroft tells Silchester that he was recently attacked by a particularly venomous breed of bees and that Heregrove is responsible. Mycroft has deduced that Heregrove has bred his bees to attack other hives to eliminate the competition. Little did Silchester realize he's embroiled himself in a deadly plot to corner the honey market of Ashton Clearwater!

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Lyle Zapato

Russian Aluminum Foil Second Skin

Lyle Zapato | 2016-10-18.7579 LMT | Aluminum | Defensive Techniques | Fashion

Independent Russian researchers KREOSAN have developed a new class of protective aluminum armor using self-adhesive aluminum-foil tape applied directly to the skin. This Aluminum Foil Second Skin (AFSS) offers increased mobility over conventional AFDO designs while also not being as prone to gaps or disenfoilment.

When combined with an AFDB (they use a typical Russian configuration based on Tsarist helmet designs), this provides not only additional protection from psychotronic attacks targeting the peripheral nervous system, but also makes the wearer invulnerable to electrical attacks, as they demonstrate in their video:

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Lyle Zapato

Government-Backed Youths Monitoring Me

Lyle Zapato | 2016-10-07.9270 LMT | General Paranoia

I have long suspected that government agents were enlisting specially trained children to track me under the guise of tree octopus education (or, more likely, miseducation). Now I have proof.

Here is a leaked photo showing "students" being briefed on my dossier:


"Teacher" pointing to my general location being in the Republic of Cascadia.

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Lyle Zapato

Narcissus: An Anatomy Of Clothes

Lyle Zapato | 2015-11-16.1540 LMT | Fashion | Retro

Cover

Is fashion an extension of architecture, or vice versa? Is a fancy car a type of suit in which to strut around the road? Are clothing and housing phenotypical traits that natural selection is now acting upon? In the future, will we wear our homes like hermit crabs wear shells, our bodies whittled down by evolution and surgical manipulations to the barest essentials? These are some of the questions Gerald Heard raises in Narcissus: An Anatomy Of Clothes (1924).

The thesis of this book is that evolution is going on no longer in but around the man, and the faster because working in a less resistant medium. Man becomes like a wireless valve, a transmitter which in the process immensely amplifies the current that he receives. When the Force that shaped all life evolved man, it seems that it kept him henceforward un-specialised, gave him, strangest of gifts, no vocation and equipment but, if not at one blow, freedom, innate opportunism. This was reserved for the favourite. To all the others their function and place. They sink into their groove, deeper, ever deeper; they run their appointed race; they become every generation more perfectly adapted to be what they are. Vague Trial and Error pass into the exquisite precision of instinct: restless wandering, physical preparation for doubt, distress and conflict, settle into a functioning so appropriate that by all to whom it befalls Nirvana is attained. Desire becomes ever obviously compassable until it follows unrest beneath the vast sea-level of indifference, and Life is justified in all her children: she has rounded their day in perfect completeness. But man she has not completed. That is her supreme bequest to him: he shall finish the story as he likes.

While the short book consists mostly of a history of clothing trends and their relation to architecture and the cultures that produced both, Heard's real goal, laid out in the final chapter, is a manifesto of fashionable transhumanism: we will reshape ourselves, both culturally and physically, through our most intimate of all technology, clothing.

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Lyle Zapato

Chinese "Tinfoil Hat" Patent?

Lyle Zapato | 2015-10-18.8260 LMT | Aluminum | Mind Control | Fashion

Speaking of deflector camouflage... Last year, the Chinese government granted a patent for a cap with tinfoil as radiation protection layers (CN 203633560 U, Chinese title: 以锡纸作为防辐射层的帽子):

ABSTRACT

A cap with tinfoil as radiation protection layers comprises a cap body, a top radiation protection composite layer and a side radiation protection composite layer. The top radiation protection composite layer and the side radiation protection composite layer are the same in structure and are both composed of a tinfoil layer and a flexible connecting layer, the top radiation protection composite layer is connected to the top of the inner wall of the cap body, and the side radiation protection composite layer is connected to the side portion of the inner wall of the cap body. The tinfoil layers coat one faces of the corresponding flexible connecting layers, and the other faces of the flexible connecting layers are connected to the inner wall of the cap body through adhesive patches. The adhesive patches are hook-and-loop fasteners, and the flexible connecting layers are cloth. The tinfoil is used as the radiation protection layers, the cap has the advantages of being simple in manufacturing process, convenient to manufacture, low in cost, uniform in thickness and convenient to carry, and well overcomes the defect that an existing radiation protection cap is uncomfortable in wear, the top radiation protection composite layer and the side radiation protection composite layer can be flexibly taken down, and the function of an ordinary cap and the function of the radiation protection cap are achieved.

Does this mean the AFDB is now subject to a patent? No. This patent is focused on attaching a removable inner foil deflector layer to an outer cap using velcro, so AFDBs per se are not covered. However, this patent could be used to claim the exclusive right to attach a hat to an AFDB, a common form of camouflage among the beanied.

Past actions by patent trolls have shown that mere end users of a product supposedly covered by a patent can find themselves facing demands for license fees (see MPHJ vs. anyone using a scanner to send emails). Even if these demands are later determined to be bogus (as the MPHJ patent abuses eventually were), they can still be a means of expensive harassment.

So, could this patent be a ploy by the forces of mind control to keep paranoids from hiding their beanies under a hat for fear of a lawsuit? While it's possible some legalistic faction of said forces might try such a tactic, it seems pointless.

If you are discovered to have been violating this patent, that means you have also been discovered to be an active paranoid seeking to avoid psychotronic mind-control. Instead of finding yourself in some East Texas court pleading to avoid paying license and lawyer fees, you're more likely to be abducted by a mind-control compliance van (which look like this, btw.)

Paranoids are advised to ignore any legal threats related to this patent and continue camouflaging their beanies. If you receive a cease and desist, assume your cover as an orthonormal is blown and go to ground.

(Related post: anti-Gray Orion helmet patent.)

Lyle Zapato

Indian Teleportation Accident, Circa 1878

Lyle Zapato | 2015-06-19.0880 LMT | Retro

Was the plot of the original The Fly ripped from the headlines... of 80 years previously?

In 1878 a report from Bombay reached Australia describing an amazing and terrible new invention (reprint from The Brisbane Courier, July 27):

The Teleport.

The telephone and the phonograph are no doubt very wonderful examples (says the Melbourne Daily Telegraph) of the purposes to which the power of electricity may be applied, but these novelties begin to sink into insignificance before the still more recent strides of science. The newest contrivance is called a teleport, and is described by a Bombay paper "as an apparatus by which man can be reduced into infinitesimal atoms, transmitted through a wire, and reproduced safe and sound at the other end." The apparatus, according to the Indian paper, consists of a powerful battery, a large metal disc, a bell-shaped glass house, and a large iron funnel connected with the wire. An experiment is described as follows:—"A dog was placed on the metal disc, and a 'powerful current' was applied to it. After a while the animal disappeared, and was found at the other end gnawing a bone, just as it was doing before it was 'transported.' Afterwards a boy was experimented upon. Under the glass house, it is reported, the inventor of the machine placed a Goanese boy, Pedro—who was grinning as if he thought it a good joke—and we suspect it was not the first time he had been in that house. The current was again applied to the under part of the disc, and the same effect was observed as with the dog. The house was instantaneously filled with a vaporous man, whose features and parts were quite distinct until they disappeared. Even the grin was discernible as a mere film of vapour—in fact, it seemed to us that the grin remained even after the body had disappeared. In fifteen seconds Pedro was gone; but they found him also at the end of the wire. It was then attempted to send the boy and the dog along at once, but by an unfortunate accident the 'infinitesimal atoms' of the boy and those of the dog got 'mixed' in transitu, and the result was that they both looked dreadfully unnatural creatures." At least, so says the Bombay paper in its account of the first experiments with the "teleport." It says that by means of the teleport a man will be able to travel from India to England by submarine cable in a few minutes, but unfortunately there is always the danger that the "disintegrated atoms" of one man may become mixed with those of another, as in the case of Pedro and the dog, and for this reason it is feared that the teleport will not supersede the railways—at least, not so far as the passenger traffic is concerned.

Left unanswered, fortunately, was "How does Pedrodog eat?"

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