PARKLAND, Wash. (AP) — A gunman burst into a coffeehouse Sunday and opened fire on four police officers as they sat working on their laptops, killing the three men and one woman in what an official described as a targeted ambush.

Pierce County Sheriff’s spokesman Ed Troyer said officers were looking for one male suspect who fled the scene and haven’t ruled out an accomplice, possibly a getaway driver.

Troyer said investigators had spoken to a person in nearby Tacoma, who gave information that led them to believe the gunman was on foot and still near the coffee shop. Troyer would not given any details nor characterize that person in any way, but said the information led officers to carefully search buildings close by.

It wasn’t clear whether the slain officers even had time to draw their weapons to return fire, Troyer said.

“This was more of an execution. Walk in with the specific mindset to shoot police officers,” Troyer said.

Troyer said the officers — all from the Lakewood Police Department — were catching up on paperwork at the beginning of their shifts when they were attacked at 8:15 a.m. Sunday.

Troyer said the attack was clearly targeted at the officers, not a robbery gone bad.

“There were marked patrol cars outside and they were all in uniform,” Troyer said.

CHAPTER XVII.-FOUR THOUSAND LEAGUES UNDER THE PACIFIC

During the daytime of the 11th of December I was busy reading in the large drawing-room. Ned Land and Conseil watched the luminous water through the half-open panels. The Nautilus was immovable. While its reservoirs were filled, it kept at a depth of 1,000 yards, a region rarely visited in the ocean, and in which large fish were seldom seen.

I was then reading a charming book by Jean Mace, The Slaves of the Stomach, and I was learning some valuable lessons from it, when Conseil interrupted me.

“Will master come here a moment?” he said, in a curious voice.

“What is the matter, Conseil?”

“I want master to look.”

I rose, went, and leaned on my elbows before the panes and watched.

In a full electric light, an enormous black mass, quite immovable, was suspended in the midst of the waters. I watched it attentively, seeking to find out the nature of this gigantic cetacean. But a sudden thought crossed my mind. “A vessel!” I said, half aloud.

“Yes,” replied the Canadian, “a disabled ship that has sunk perpendicularly.”

Ned Land was right; we were close to a vessel of which the tattered shrouds still hung from their chains. The keel seemed to be in good order, and it had been wrecked at most some few hours. Three stumps of masts, broken off about two feet above the bridge, showed that the vessel had had to sacrifice its masts. But, lying on its side, it had filled, and it was heeling over to port. This skeleton of what it had once been was a sad spectacle as it lay lost under the waves, but sadder still was the sight of the bridge, where some corpses, bound with ropes, were still lying. I counted five–four men, one of whom was standing at the helm, and a woman standing by the poop, holding an infant in her arms. She was quite young. I could distinguish her features, which the water had not decomposed, by the brilliant light from the Nautilus. In one despairing effort, she had raised her infant above her head– poor little thing!–whose arms encircled its mother’s neck. The attitude of the four sailors was frightful, distorted as they were by their convulsive movements, whilst making a last effort to free themselves from the cords that bound them to the vessel. The steersman alone, calm, with a grave, clear face, his grey hair glued to his forehead, and his hand clutching the wheel of the helm, seemed even then to be guiding the three broken masts through the depths of the ocean.

What a scene! We were dumb; our hearts beat fast before this shipwreck, taken as it were from life and photographed in its last moments. And I saw already, coming towards it with hungry eyes, enormous sharks, attracted by the human flesh.

However, the Nautilus, turning, went round the submerged vessel, and in one instant I read on the stern–”The Florida, Sunderland.”

Before you advertise
All the fame is implied
With no fortune unseen
Sell the rights
To your blight
Time-machine

While I’m dulled by excess
And a cynic at best
My art imitates crime
Paid for by
The allies
So invest

Now I’m finding truth is a ruin
Nauseous end that nobody is pursuing
Staring into glassy eyes
Mesmerized
There’s a vintage thirst returning
But I’m sheltered by my channel-surfing
Every famine virtual
Retrovertigo

A tribute to false memories
With conviction
Cheap imitation
Is it fashion or disease?
Post-ironic
Remains a mouth to feed

Sell the rights
To your blight
And you’ll eat

Now I’m finding truth is a ruin
Nauseous end that nobody is pursuing
Staring into glassy eyes
Mesmerized
See the vintage robot wearied
Then awakened by revision theories
Every famine virtual
Retrovertigo

No Saturday Open Mic tonight? I understand completely if everyone is busy with anonymous Belkin routers and took a week off.

Please forgive the long and schizoid nature of this post. I want to be good but you have my wheels spinning again.

Alright, open page 6 in photoshop.

From top of bounding box in the first panel to 1111 pixels, is 1066 pixels. We like 1111 for reasons I don’t feel like explaining. Just say it resembles four sticks like the Zeppelin song Four Sticks which I happen to think is a great song. And 1066 was a pretty interesting year yes?

The width of the panels appears to be 660 pixels. Again, another interesting number. If you know what a Golden Rectangle is you might already know that a box with a width of 660 and a length of 1066 is what they call golden, but whatever, I was bored and so wasted an evening doing simple math and constructed a Golden Rectangle from scratch. Da Vinci used geometry like this in his paintings so why not Mr. Duffield? Paul is cool like that, right?

From the bottom left corner, using the width 660 as the side of a square from which to begin drawing a golden rectangle (as in Wolfram’s instructions here), follow the steps until you’ve drawn a line between the upper right corner of the square and the midpoint of the square’s opposite side. You’ve drawn a line which perfectly threads the hook dangling in panel 3, which itself has a string dangling from it, which along with the drawn hypotenuse implies yet another right triangle, which is very humorous. The length of this line is calculated as the square root of a squared plus b squared right? a squared plus b squared in this case is 544500.

We in the time travel business like symbolic fours that turn into symbolic fives and 544500 has that nice near-palindromic feature inside it, followed by two zeds. If the Roman alphabet we use today were numbered in a sequence (with a = 1, b = 2, c = 3 … and so forth), 5445 would spell out EDDE, such as the name of the Crusade-era church in Lebanon, which is also pretty interesting, not to be flogging old Christian shit unnecessarily.

So anyway, find the square root of 544500 and you have the hypotenuse being about 738 pixels long. 738 pixels away from the midpoint according to Euclid’s instructions on making a Golden Rectangle, is the precise top of the panel 1, thus confirming page 6 here is a Golden Rectangle.

You are very tricky people.

Continue the little golden rectangle game until you’ve chopped up sequential boxes to draw the Golden Spiral. With the spiral superimposed on page 6, in one orientation anyway, the curve starts along Kait’s path through the doorway, and then after some adventures drills infinitely into the top corner of one of the gas cans in panel 1. Here are four versions of Page 6 with a Golden Spiral drawn onto it, in no particular order. This example here would be on the top right.

If oriented another way, the spiral comes in like sunlight through the window in panel 1, goes through Kait’s head and then through a cupboard into her abdomen in panel 2, then the buckle of one of the bags on her belt, then approximates the fish eye curve in panel 3 while leading through the door Kait has just come through (at the spot where the plaster is crumbling by the light switch). It continues though other cracks in the plaster and terminates very nearby the blue plastic bin in which I used to store my stuff at the apartment off SE 23rd Ave where I first read Transmetropolitan, here in Portland. Nearby the plastic bin at that apartment were all my trash bags full of clothing, which are also evident here.

Oriented a different way, the Golden Spiral leads through the door Kait entered in panel 3, then through the gas can, then through more cracked plaster, then the knob on the oven someone else noticed the other day. In this case the spiral bores infinitely into the wall almost exactly between Kait and the outer contour of the oven, with another humorous right triangle formed by the the boxes making up the spiral and yet another crack in the plaster. Plaster being made of calcium, this reminds me of broken bones, which, well…, you know, those suck.

Oriented a different way, the spiral begins approximately at the suspected location of the fish eye lens in panel 2, travels along the length of Kait’s arm in panel 1 and then the gas cans, curves through the cracks in the plaster on the left of panel 3, then one of the plastic bags on the ground, through where Kait’s foot gets cut off, then her right hand, then the shelf next to the oven and then through the burner on the oven. Then it goes back through the door Kait has just traversed, golden rectangles forming interesting triangles all over and of course the obvious pentagram right where it should be on most diagrams of the properties of phi, the Golden Ratio. It then goes through Kait’s magical head, eventually terminating at what looks like the focal point of the camera lens of doom, as measured by the fish eye curve of the leftmost wall. A circle drawn around that focal point using the curved wall as a radius includes the entire room in panel 3, and also the oven along with Kait’s lower half in panel 2. Other interesting circles drawn with cracked plaster bits as the center include the gas cans and the oven.

So yes, lots of gas cans and oven items of note.

Seeing my old apartment in here, and thinking about all my old houses, I realize that I wish I’d thought of all this before defending Luke in earlier threads, because I also used to have a housemate named Luke who was a total dick, who was violent, and who was accused of rape at least once, in a way that wasn’t a joke and not as subject to interpretation as a fictitious comic mystery. His greatest defender in my household was a short bald girl with initials approximating chi rho (or rho chi, to achieve Arkady, whatever), who had also overdosed when she was younger, and who otherwise is just as brilliant and charming as our Freakangel friend who enjoys the CHIKKENS so very much.

So I get this now. Sorry I’m late.

The “Arkady” I lived with was very upset with Christianity for oppressing all the teen lesbians, whereas I was curious about at least some “Christian studies” because of the math, and this was one of many reasons we didn’t get along back then, aside from my being utterly insane. She lives in Texas now and trains dogs for a living, which of course are Warren’s favorite, the enemy of humans. I think she was also trying to install malware on my system the last few times we spoke in AIM chat. Where I first noticed that my residence was being spied on a few years ago, which happens a lot, was in the place where I first had the blue bin near the bags of laundry. For various reasons I was inclined to think it was my Arkady doing this to me but she denied all involvement. If it wasn’t her doing the spying and the hacking and the pranking and so forth, it wouldn’t be the first time blame was purposely misdirected at a hapless internet user I used to know in real life.

I assumed the Luke character in Freakangels was based on something else, because of his pants problem and his monologue on floods and time back in the beginning of the series, so I totally blanked on my actual housemate named Luke. I assumed the Alice character connected to an ex-girlfriend who was briefly in England around the same time Freakangels was being put together, according to comics media I’ve read here and elsewhere, and that the Mark character was based on yet another (total cunt) housemate who is an associate of hers. Two Summers ago after leaving the compromised apartment, I spent a week up in Seattle with a friend who lived with me and Luke and “Arkady” fifteen years ago, and he was busy growing strawberries in his free time, so, check. Maybe? I’m wrong a lot these days so hopefully I’m not jumping to conclusions but boy do I like strawberries! Hell yeah!

The other Freakangels are a little unclear to me so far, though I was engaged once to a lady who didn’t like boring monogamy and would sometimes organize orgies like someone around here in the Freakangels comic, ahem, and to be honest I never should have left her alone with my computer back in January, the night that it suddenly snowed in Portland for no good reason at all. Otherwise, rain and floods and living several days in the future are what I do, so I’ve always been curious about what inspires this comic every week, even if I don’t say anything out loud because I’m scared of writing something stupid in a giant crowd again.

There have been pranks of this magnitude pulled off before (like the entirety of Catholicism for instance), but what is more interesting is that this comic turned out to be a time machine, either by mistake or by design, incorporating Warren’s readers into its architecture. This might be construed as unbelievable and/or at least a little dangerous. Information from my life is being broadcast through all you guys into all sorts of times and places, at least partially creating the history we live in now, in a way which is not a lie at all, seriously, instead it seems kind of amazing. If Wikipedia is to be believed, it might be how I wound up as St. David the Patron Saint of the Welsh, Warren’s favorite, back in the sixth century, about which you’ll just have to trust me because I don’t feel like explaining the whole thing right now. But Wikipedia can be falsified like anything else right? So maybe the article there is also part of a prank.

I won’t go into the shape on the cracked floor near the blue bin in the last panel, which is a customized tesseract pointing at the place where I used to both sleep and dream in that apartment. It’s not like I can copyright such a thing anyway, but it is a part of something I’ve been studying for the last two years or so.

My understanding of the prank as I first experienced it in 2007, where my internet and my real life interacted in ways which should not be possible, was to slowly drive me crazy with interconnected story phenomenon until everyone was done laughing at my devastated life. Perhaps this was some kind of payback for obtuse comments I’d left at other locations on the web not realizing just how obtuse they were. I’m not sure anyone caught on at first to the natural disasters and unusual violence that accompanied every step of this joke as comic book fighting dopplered out in every direction, in every dimension, but hopefully that should be obvious by now.

This is a very special time we live in, I hope you know that.

By the way Warren, I’m pretty sure it was Republicans who fucked up your computer with the novel on it. Popular activist figures have to be way careful during an election year, especially the author of Crooked Little Vein and so much else. Trying to catch them might be difficult though.

Do you guys know Roger Waters? That guy is cool.

*waves at Dr. Who*

p.s. My favorite part of the Wolfram diagram is how you can use it to spell the word “fap”.

Free Will Astrology Aquarius horoscope for the week of July 23, 2009:

You should closely monitor your environment for beguiling appearances of the number seven. I have reason to believe that seven may be involved in your current inconveniences and dilemmas. I theorize that seven has been trying to call attention to itself in an odd or irritating manner so as to get you to tune in to certain benefits that could be associated with the number seven — benefits you’ve been overlooking. I would even go so far as to speculate that seven may be both the cause of and the cure for your itch. Be especially alert for sevens that are in the vicinity of the color green or the letter “G.” Perk up your intuition anytime seven appears in advertisements, boxes of food, tattoos, or t-shirts.

Chuang-tzu: The Inner Chapters:

The ruler of the South Sea was called Light; the ruler of the North Sea, Darkness; and the ruler of the Middle Kingdom, Primal Chaos. From time to time, light and darkness met one another in the kingdom of Primal Chaos, who made them welcome. Light and Darkness wanted to repay his kindness and said, “All men have seven openings with which they see, hear, eat, and breathe, but Primal Chaos has none. Let us try to give him some.” So every day they bored one hole, and on the seventh day, Primal Chaos died.

Words & music by Doc Pomus and Mort Shuman:

Bright light city gonna set my soul
Gonna set my soul on fire
Got a whole lot of money that’s ready to burn,
So get those stakes up higher
There’s a thousand pretty women waitin’ out there
And they’re all livin’ devil may care
And I’m just the devil with love to spare
Viva Las Vegas, Viva Las Vegas

How I wish that there were more
Than the twenty-four hours in the day
‘Cause even if there were forty more
I wouldn’t sleep a minute away
Oh, there’s black jack and poker and the roulette wheel
A fortune won and lost on every deal
All you need’s a strong heart and a nerve of steel
Viva Las Vegas, Viva Las Vegas

Viva Las Vegas with you neon flashin’
And your one-arm bandits crashin’
All those hopes down the drain
Viva Las Vegas turnin’ day into nighttime
Turnin’ night into daytime
If you see it once
You’ll never be the same again

I’m gonna keep on the run
I’m gonna have me some fun
If it costs me my very last dime
If I wind up broke up well
I’ll always remember that I had a swingin’ time
I’m gonna give it everything I’ve got
Lady luck please let the dice stay hot
Let me shoot a seven with every shot
Viva Las Vegas, Viva Las Vegas,Viva Las Vegas
Viva, Viva Las Vegas

Thanksgiving 1986, Dave Whiteman awakes in his Beverly Hills home, and minutes later is drenched by his sprinkler system suddenly malfunctioning while he goes to get the morning paper.

Nick Nolte awakes in a different location, with different problems.

I really wasn’t hoping to see Nick Nolte’s ass today for any reason actually.

http://www.youtube.com/user/YoUpOintY

Her videos there.

Superb typography video made for Ratatat song Nostrand:

Bush’s Exit Leaves Satire at Wit’s End
By CLYDE HABERMAN
Published: February 16, 2009

You’ve already heard more than enough about collapsed stock portfolios, vanished fortunes, disappearing jobs and consumer confidence that is fading faster than the Knicks’ playoff hopes. Let’s focus instead on a different crisis. What do you do when your raison d’être starts looking more like a raisin d’être — kind of shriveled?

If you’ve asked yourself that very question, then you know what life is like these days for a band of political satirists who have gone by the name of Billionaires for Bush.

For most of this decade, they sallied forth in tuxedos and tiaras for street theatrics about protecting developers from predator environmentalists and shielding the wealthy from money-crazed politicians who would have them pay more taxes. For some in the group, the holiday observed on Monday was known as Buy Your Own President’s Day.

They were getting along just fine, these Billionaires were, when a terrible thing happened.

George W. Bush left office.

It’s hard to be a Billionaire for Bush when there is no Bush. The group might have recast itself as Billionaires for Obama. But that would have required “irony we can believe in,” said Andrew Boyd, who sometimes goes by his Billionaire name, Phil T. Rich.

“Here’s the conundrum,” Mr. Boyd said. “Can you point out that the emperor has no clothes when you like the emperor — and his clothes?”

We told you this was a crisis.

Not that it’s entirely new. Satirists have struggled with the ascension of Barack Obama for a while now. Clearly, some white comedians are pulling their punches out of fear of being accused of racial insensitivity (though racial equality should mean that a black president may be skewered as thoroughly as a white one). Race aside, many comics feel that any new president deserves to be cut some slack. As an added inhibitor, some have said, this president is simply not his predecessor.

“He’s difficult to satirize,” Mr. Boyd said. “He’s very self-aware. He calls himself out on stuff. He’s able to leaven his own heaviness.” Self-awareness, Mr. Boyd said, was not a conspicuous trait of the previous president.

It should be noted that the Billionaires are not exactly equal opportunity offenders. Their politics fall squarely left of center. But unlike many activists, left or right, their weapon of choice is a rapier rather than a sledgehammer. In their reverse world, Vice President Dick Cheney was unfairly attacked and Halliburton wrongly maligned. Big Oil works for the common good, and streets must be liberated from destructive bicyclists.

“Bicycling is a gateway drug to environmentalism,” said Paul Bartlett, or Robin Eublind in Billionaire-speak.

The group tried switching focus as the Bush presidency’s days dwindled down. Some ventured forth as Billionaires for Bailouts. Others threw their support behind Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg by forming Billionaires for Term Limits Except for Billionaires.

But it wasn’t the same. The Champagne had lost its fizz.

“I think we were serious about having our brand lose its brand identity,” said Elissa Jiji or, if you prefer, Meg A. Bucks. Mr. Bartlett observed that “it’s not the time for ostentatious wealth.” Even though there are still plenty of potential targets — Bernard L. Madoff and bonus-hungry Wall Street executives, for example — there seems little point going after them when others are, too.

“They’re no longer held in such esteem that they need to be knocked down,” Mr. Boyd said.

For now, the Billionaires have chosen to put away their gowns, toss aside their top hats and leave their badminton rackets in the closet. Soon after the Obama inauguration, a few dozen of them met at a Greenwich Village bar for what Ms. Jiji described as “a last huzzah.” She had “thought we’d be sad,” she said, “but it was very festive.” Mr. Boyd called it a “farewell to arms contracts.”

But bear in mind that “Billionaires never die,” he said. “We just refinance.”

So they may be back. They could be like Tom Joad in reverse. If there’s a rich man being wrongly hassled by a tax collector, they’ll be there. If there’s a war profiteer unfairly condemned in the press, they’ll be there.

Look on the bright side, they said. It probably costs less than before to bribe corrupt public officials.

What they’re missing, though, are tunes to capture the mood. You have to give the Depression this much: It produced some great numbers. Mr. Boyd suggested reworking a classic from that era. This one would be called “Brother, Can You Spare a Diamond?”

E-mail: haberman@nytimes.com

I am the heaven
I am the water
I am the dirt beneath your rollers
I am your secret smut & lost metal money
Down your cracks

I am your cracks & crannies

I am the clouds
I am embroidered
I am the author of all tucks & damask piping
I am the chrome dinette
I am the chrome dinette
I am the eggs of all persuasion
I am all days & nights
I am all days & nights
I am all days & nights
I am all days & nights
I am here
And you are my sofa
I am here
And you are my sofa
I am here
And you are my sofa

Chris Ellis is so awesome. He is just the nicest person and has the best intentions, we can only hope he survives exposure to all those beautiful models with his brain intact. He lent me the computer I used at home for months, set me up with smokes and all sorts of handy stuff. He scattered when I got busy during the holidays and I felt bad about that, but he stayed busy.

He just came back from D.C. where he took some new pictures.

Seriously, Pat Buchanan? What?

http://www.irelandinpicture.net/

http://www.irelandinpicture.net/2009/05/stream.html

http://www.irelandinpicture.net/2009/05/boreens-and-backroads.html

http://www.irelandinpicture.net/2009/05/train-ride-killimordaly.html

http://www.irelandinpicture.net/2009/04/bog-track-killimordaly.html

http://www.irelandinpicture.net/2009/04/full-moon-killimordaly.html

http://www.irelandinpicture.net/2009/04/dunkellin-river-killimorday-co-galway.html

http://www.irelandinpicture.net/2009/04/road-sculptures-county-meath.html