Sweet Cheeta

I hope I do not have to apologize for the simian centric posts as of late but we have some special monkey news for you. Everybody wish Cheeta, the worlds most famous living monkey a wonderful 75th birthday.

According to the internets, Cheeta's career began in 1932 with Tarzan the Ape Man and went on to make a total of 12 Hollywood pictures. Most of Cheeta's pictures were Tarzan films, but he did foray into some animal ensemble work with 1942's Dr Doolittle.


According to Hollywood legend, Cheeta was apparently growing more and more despondent over the publics view of him as Tarzan's sidekick and not the other way around.

After his smashing performance in Dr Doolittle, Cheeta retired to his Palm Springs animal sanctuary were he unwinds embalming sharks in large boxes of glass. No not really, He makes and sells abstract paintings.

I had no idea how long monkeys could live so I checked it out and it appears that monkeys that live in the wild usually live to between 30 and 40, whereas monkeys in captivity live to be about 60.

Unless that monkey picks up bad habits like smoking or wields a firearm in gangsta fashion.

Pan Troglydytes of the World Unite

It looks like we may have a new spectacle in the Cultural Wars approaching. The Theatre of War this time is ... Wait for it...Vienna- Vienna? say what? Not only that, This showdown is about the human rights of a Chimpanzee!

Check it out

Well it seems it is probably more about his right to stay out of the local vivisection lab. Now a noble crew of Primate Groupies are hurling fist fulls of cash and thumping their chests for all the world, and just generally stirring up some hominid righteousness which, if you think about it, is what is right.

After his trip through the court systems Haisl,the chimp, will surely come out with a new blood thirst for humans and a mean overhand attack with a sharpened stick to impale his chimp detractors.

Or maybe he is held in contempt of court for smoking a cigarette and spends a long week end in the local lock up before being bailed out by Paul McCartney or Robin Williams and ultimately returned to his homeland. Where he would shiv his way to the top and rule benevolently in a self assured god-like status, knowing the human world so intimately. And mucho mating.

All I really know is that he needs to get the hell out of northern Europe. Even their Artist are uniquely barbaric. This Fellow tattoos Swine.

Radio Radio

So this morning when I am rolling to work in my American Car with FM radio I punch the buttons on the old man side of the dial just in time-I am assured-to ride shotgun with Bad Company or rape and pillage with the mighty Zep.

And predictably for me and classic rock I'm half right.


What I do hear when I tune in is the ending of Led Zeppelins Dancing Days when the lady DJ (always with the lady DJ's these guys) comes on and says that's right That is Dancing Days by Led Zeppelin and it is our Tenth song in a row.


I scream aloud as I wait for my parking gate to open. I scream again "Of Course it's Dancing Days! If you haven't learned that in the last twenty five years then you should be condemned to another twenty five years of listening to this shit" Then My gate opened and they went to commercial and I sat in traffic and punched the buttons some more.

Naturally all of this got me thinking about comfort and predictability.

I commute through the puzzle zones before lunch .Disc Jockey's, in exchange for the promise of a free lunch, posit conundrums for the audience to decipher. The audience is listless and easily distracted.


The familiar noise from the air waves fills thier quiet spots. lists and themes are rigoursly wrought from a small canon of music that stretches from Bono to Zozo. Classic Rock.

The Lunch contests on these radio station are usually in a form not unlike the wheel of fortune where the DJ knows a word or phrase and the listener is supposed to divine this word or phrase from some amalgamation of song titles and band names.

Most times these questions are simple enough for most machine shops, kitchen workers, roofers, carpenters to figure out. The logic is working class as far as I can tell but i have the luxury of having to listen to only the last ten minutes.


Unlike the oldies station that does its best to throw its lunchtime weight around with the office world of women and their many marketability in the obvious parallel of the construction sight- the dentist office gals , the ladies in the printing shops front office, the harpies in accounts receivable at Lockheed Martin.

In a post snack time world where puzzles are hard and just being able to list ten songs passes as achievement, at work when one should be, I dunno working, they waste no time getting their call in in less than ten minutes. And it seems that it is always Alba Garcia who wins.

So I've been re watching a lot of Peter Greenaway flicks lately and last nights addition was the aptly title The Cook the Thief His Wife and her Lover.

I recall seeing this feature a few times before, but it only looked familiar. So the story seemed new to me.

But I am not here to talk about the film, I just need to note an observation I had while watching this film.


The Bad Guy in the story,Albert Spica- played by Michael Gambone, is a hideous self absorbed thug without a clue as to his vulgarness. Every thing about this character seems to be the prototype of another clueless self absorbed bully Ricky Gervais's David Brent.

Although Greenaway's brute is a disagreeable wife beating murderer with a penchant for scatological violence-he really makes you like him when he shivs a eunuch child-
one must remember he is after all English.

Even though David Brent is a short sighted selfish sycophantic tyrant unable to mask his extraordinary ability to suck-up one wonders how he may behave if he knew his wife was making hot love in the dank blue light of a spider infested mop closet behind the coke machine on the second floor?

Deep Space, Fire and Ice

Seems like Old Fermi and his Paradox are making the rounds again. But this time the extra-terrestials are waiting on us. And I hope they aren't expecting us to bring the beer.

According to Stephen Webb's new book, If the Universe Is Teeming with Aliens… Where Is Everybody? Fifty Solutions to the Fermi Paradox and the Problem of Extraterrestrial Life it is the aliens who have come to the conclusion that it is natural, logical and right for other life forms to colonize deep space.


It would appear that everybody is waiting on someone else to make the first move.

And from the Crazy Occidents file we have this.

According to this story, the infamous Japanese whaling ship Nisshin Maru is smoldering off the coast of New Zealand. The apparent cause of the fire has (ironically) something to do with Whale Oil.

This particular vessel is a bit different then the whaling boats used by Norway and Greenland.

The 8,000 ton "research" vessel not only has a crew of 149 and water cannons for protection, it also has an on board meat processing plant to expedite the whole business of canning whale. It is usually accompanied by several smaller whaling ships of which it uploads their cargo.

This is not the first time that the Japanese Whaling industry has found itself the object of derision. In 1986 several years after the World put a moratoriaum on whale hunting, Japan resumed its ancient practice under the guise of Research.

Greenpeace and other Eco-Activist have repeatedly harassed the Japanese Whaling Industry going as far as ramming one of their ships a few years ago. The Esperanza, Greenpeace's reconfiged tug boat that is well known for shadowing the whaling vessels, received the Nisshin Maru distress call, but the admiral of the ship chose not to receive their help and instead unloaded its crew to one of the additonal whaling vessels traveling with the hunting fleet.

Now the Nisshin Maru smolders in the icy seas of the Antarctic, awaiting for to be swallowed by the mighty leviathan.

You may also remember the Nisshin Maru from Matthew Barney's tedious and lethargic crapterpiece Drawing Restraint no 9.

Incoming Manchu

I often hear the question, Hey Steven Vogeler, proprietor of this here SvenBlog, what makes you think you have what it takes to blog? And when I tell them that I, Steven Vogeler, proprietor of this here Svenblog only does it for the glory, they look at me as if I may have somehow shamelessly duped them into assisting me with obtaining data on how my blog shows up in search queries. And they may be right.

Remember how the Svenblog contingent was all ready to cancel their subscriptions to Asian Thumbs after China fragged their own Satellite? Well it seems the rest of the world has finally stopped applauding now that they realize all of their precious satellites are now in danger of colliding with some of that yellow tech debris speeding about in loopy orbits at speed upto 10,000 miles per hour.

Long gone are the days when space junk was little more than Monkey parts and the Norton Belt.Today that empty space is a wasteland of blindsiding projectiles. Every thing from Gemini 4 astronaut Edward Whites lost glove to the Vanguard I, launched in 1958 are careening about, destined for re-entry, the Mir or some poor cosmonaut's double wrapped meat sack.

And since we here at Steven Vogeler's Svenblog are big fans of all things cartographical, I now provide you with an approximate map of all the space junk orbiting this mortal coil.

And also for contrast, I give you this rather uncomplicated yet simple cartographical view of something a bit closer to home, Earth junk just doesn't do it justice one would think.


And finally I bring us around to that junk that really sends us for a loop the junk in our trunk that is our DNA. Watch this hypnotic video and forget about all the moon dust and paint flakes that behead future escapees and groove on the almost absolute density of the subject matter and the jabborwockian narration of the seemingly disembodied speaker.

Listen closely as I did and it sounds like some permutation of Latin, now long dead, yet still trying to communicate from deep within. A language not so much lost as absorbed. To consider how these ancient and microscopic systems demand new nomenclature is to consider new worlds, new life.

Amongst the phantasmic jargon and recombinant suffixes, the only verbs I recognized from the narration were secrete, diffuse, activate, trigger, cluster, immobilize, reorganize, migrate, insert.
Sounds like an average day on any scale.

Rubberbands to the future

Im so so sorry all you nano-fans , it has been a long time since I posted, so long in fact that according to this page, and thinking gestational, which we do here at svenblog, it has been 14,984 days give or take about ten days.


But I hear you and you are probably saying something like"- but what is up with the past and the future and the hey hey uh here and now, what with the comets and the dinosaurs and the comical yet insightful speculations to the demise of our brothers the Neanderthal"?


I won't lie, I wasn't eating sushi, and that got me thinking.

Well not really but here is what I got.

The Japanese seem exceedingly capable of not only finding ancient sea monsters, and catching them on film, yet cannot control physically catching them and thus killing them.

And now that I have your paleo-archeaolgical attention, it looks like that little man from the Flores islands (Homo floresiensis) is up for re-appropriation. He's probably shaken in his yet undiscovered reptilian boots after the shameful bitch slap that Pluto recently took when the Astro's from the planet naming commission downgraded his ass. Now ain't nobody gonna name their child Pluto

And at the other end of the scale is the fascinating concept of Horizontal Gene Transfer. HGT as the lab boys call it, is another spike in that identity crisis I suffer when it comes to contemplating the super-organism that is me.


Basically it is the concept that successful gene combos can cross species by inserting their DNA into another species' DNA by way of bacteria, thus uploading genetic sequences to be uniquely adopted and later grow more adapted.

Kinda like Avian Flu.