Dan Zembrosky, The MQ’s cherished font of gratuitous Transformers references, passed away in a kayaking accident this past Sunday. He was only 24 years old.

Dan joined the paper the year I was Editor in Chief, and he took the helm after Abe in 2005. His assent was as natural and inevitable as gravity. He was without a doubt the hardest working funnyman we had, generating prodigious amounts of content both written and visual. When the editorial board looked back on each issue, we’d sometimes have to laugh at the fact that fully one half of the articles were written, or edited, or edited and re-written by Dan, but the truth is we would have been fucked without him. His footprint was gargantuan.

I’m only beginning to process how unfair this is, but everyone who knew Dan knows this: the world is worse for having lost him.

Grab your popcorn, it’s movie time!

Perversion for Profit

I was going to post this hilarious 1965 anti-pornography propaganda film as a plain ol’ link, but my commentary grew too lengthy and I figured it deserved its own post. Watch the movie, though. That’s the first step.

In forty years, today’s middle america will seem just as antiquated and scared, and the expression of its beliefs and fears—TV, newspapers or otherwise—will be just as pitiful. Progress is a juggernaut, and while the pace may slow occasionally (e.g. The Inquisition and/or Patriot Act), trying to freeze culture in place is a losing battle. Conservatives, especially the religious right, remind me of Sisyphus. I often wonder how people can shut their eyes to these trends I see laid out through history. Bathing suits will keep getting smaller, skirts will get shorter and so on and so forth, despite the best intentions of some.

Of course, the ancient Romans were all card-carrying NAMBLA members until the Middle Ages came and ruined their party, but that seems to only reinforce this idea that cultural progress cannot be stopped. Will contemporary society evolve to the point of accepting child molestation? Who knows? Maybe we’ll have plunged the Earth into another ice age before it reaches that point.

Regardless, I’m interested in seeing how current trends play out. Kids, like every generation before them, are wearing less and less, and thongs are now routinely marketed to girls who aren’t even in high school yet. Kids are posting risque photos and movies of themselves online as fast as MySpace, YouTube and their clones can handle them, and in general the internet-savy seem eager to publicize more and more of their lives for their peers to see. In a paper I wrote a couple years ago I hypothesized that phone cameras and other ubiquitous recording devices might evaporate the notion of personal lives, and I wouldn’t be opposed to walking around naked like the Native Americans used to once technology helps us get over the idea that nudity is heinous. Imagine that, a society in which people aren’t ashamed of their bodies.

I hope that by the time I die everyone just walks around public naked and fingering their own asses. There, I said it.

I’m in the New York Times, here (use bugmenot.com to bypass registration). Mike helped with code, too. Same story in CNET, ‘cept with my picture ‘projected’ over yonder. Look for the sousveillance stuff, and keep in mind that they totally fucked up the description (natch).

I bought a new hard drive today, and while it formats I have been combing through archived high school work tucked away on one of my other disks. I’m still really proud of some of these essays, especially after seeing what passes for college writing these days. Then again, there’s some embarrassing stuff too. In 10th grade, when a teacher I didn’t respect asked for poetry, I turned in a couple dozen shitty haikus like this one:

Hello, beautiful
Are handcuffs necessary?
Oh, crap. You’re a cop.

There was an earthquake this morning. The second gentle rumble in as many months. Actually, since they both occurred on the 12th, I suppose that makes them exactly two months apart. I worry that they portend a larger quake in the near future.

Barring some sort of grade disaster, I graduated on Friday. I was so busy with my ICAM senior project and my finals that I never really had time to process it, so the whole thing feels anticlimactic. My parents are throwing a little party for me in LA on Saturday, but it’ll just be Utako and I in a sea of my relatives. Rather awkward. I’m trying to decide what stories are appropriate for my aunts and uncles and which aren’t. Not many are.

I had big plans for this update, but I’m a bit hungover and have forgotten all the things I planned on retelling. More later.