it appears the phrase “the new normal” is actually quite a popular phrase to describe or construct notions around for contemporary fine art practice (see the new normal mixery).

However this title from an article written by Tom Holert and published February 2006 in the art world’s glossy monthly, ArtForum (60% ads, 30% paperweight, 9% writing, 1% blog-worthy), takes its origin from an exhibition that took place at the end of 2005 titled “On Normality: Art in Serbia 1989-2001″ and refers back to the word normality, which the author says in the 1990s in Serbia

became a kind of ideological password, part of a code meant to sublimate societal antagonisms through the invocation of “the nation” or of a postcommunist version of capitalism, or both.

full article on Flickr - page 1, page 2

Plaxo was originally used by this blogger starting many years back as an online address book or rolodex. Moving house every few months, including between different countries, meant it was becoming increasingly difficult for me to keep track of who was where, what their phone number was, etc. - also because a growing number of my peers were following the same nomadic living patterns. I started using Plaxo to compile and keep track of all of this data, knowing that no matter where I went to in the world I could always access the Internet (even from a library public PC) and retrieve the data I was looking for. Plaxo’s most-useful function for me was their Address Book, with database fields for multiple emails, phone numbers, integrated maps, etc. Very useful. These days Plaxo is looking to increase its membership base by supporting social networking functions such as integrating the ability for Plaxo members to share Flickr photos, calendars, etc. Well, either way, I noticed when recently inputing a new entry in my own address book that the address bar of my Firefox 3 browser included a coded reference to normal:

I absolutely hate MySpace. I never never ever never refuse to visit it. Refuse to utilize it as a ‘resource’ or ‘tool’ or anything of the sort. I hate the auto-loading music, the layout, the impossibility of finding what you’re looking for (what ARE you looking for on MySpace anyhow!). Still, someone forwarded in this link to talknormaltalknormal user, some band based in Brooklyn, and it’s impossible to pass up.

Some band. on MySpace. that’s all it is. talknormaltalknormal

this headline screengrab taken this afternoon from the BBC website caught my attention for its use of the word normal to describe the should-be diplomatic status quo between Russia and Georgia which has more or less been put on hold ever since Russia’s incursion into Georgian sovereign territory.

the BBC’s headline refers to a quote by NATO Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, and what he actually said was,

We have determined that we cannot continue with business as usual.

the BBC merely recoded his wording from usual to normal. And subsequently a new expression - business as normal - was borne!

full article here

Enough with the gaming and virtual references to normal, the above images are from a real-world postage machine, Normal Preset apparently referencing standard 1st class postage rates for letters and packages, accessible via a quick touch of a button! Too bad I couldn’t find the manual for this thing, as I’m sure it would have been jam-packed with instances of Normal. I’ll keep hunting!

more geekathon-normal going on here, this screengrab is from the options menu of Activision’s late-2007 release Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, at times set in parts of the world that pit US marines (or UK SAS operatives) against Russian ultranationalist forces, ironic considering the current political turmoil and conflict in North Ossetia, Georgia, the former Soviet bloc country.

It would seem “Normal” is a standard term in gaming development to describe menu options and variables, and so being somewhat of a geek gaming enthusiast, I reckon there’ll be more where this came from!

or so this postcard-quote by Derek Jarman - the short-lived but prodigious English film director and artist - tells me:

Wowee it’s a good day! As if a small serving of normal tracking isn’t already at capacity (after a completely empty July), then someone actually sends in the first submitted what is normal? sighting! More odd, the submission was sent via a cell phone, courtesy of ‘vzwpix.com’, which is Verizon Wireless’s online site for user’s to manage their phone’s content. Wowee! Was it sent live? Shot in the wild? What is it, anyhow!?

A quick google search revealed what my suspicion somewhat hoped for, that not only is the phrase ‘normal readers’ indexed by the notorious googlebot, but it references a book that Google has also digitized for online reading!

A three-volume set by May Louise Harvey, the user-submitted image above shows the ‘THIRD BOOK’. Google has digitized the FIRST BOOK. The three grabs below show the only instances of normal I can be bothered to find in this title - it’s content otherwise being too much of a bore to troll through.

Even with a glance I couldn’t figure out why it’s titled what it’s titled.

Joe Torre, easily regarded as one of the best active managers in baseball - even if his Dodgers are merely .500-hovering all season - and who will no doubt enter the pantheon of baseball for his commitment to the game, the players, the fans and again the game, recently admitted following the Manny Ramirez trade to Los Angeles that part of his managerial repertoire includes conducting “normal meetings”:

“I don’t know what my thinking is right now. Manny obviously will be in the middle of that lineup, and we’re just going to have to, as we go along, try to figure it out. I’ll probably get the whole team in there together before we break up for our normal meetings just to sort of give them some thoughts. I really don’t know who’s going to get impacted the most on this thing.”

[via MLB article]

Continuing today’s geekathon-game posts:

Type or Die. Write or I’ll Bite!

Just a couple of the taglines for the SEGA franchise title House of the Dead (1996) which was later ported and modded to kill zombies with your keyboard instead of a game-gun. Originally an arcade game (no shit, see image below), the above images are from a PC (Windows) port of the game. A more-recent version has been ported to the Nintendo DS Lite for Japanese players looking to improve their English writing skills (see here) - but some of us are forever attached to our keyboards (be they Qwerty or… Dvorak!) so if you’re looking to improve your typing skills while killing zombies and zombie-bosses:

image from Wikipedia entry for Typing of the Dead

(also see Typing of the Dead gamespot page)

From one of the opening sequences of the CAPCOM title Okami, this shot shows Issun, the game’s guide embodied as a bouncing bug, asking the sun god Amaterasu, “The tree’s returned to normal, huh?”

Just before, the Kamiki Village tree was under some sort of curse. Issun would often ask or state things in a reverse manner, but it must be questioned, what is a “normal” tree?

Another Deadwood reference that.

In this scene Calamity Jane, as played by Robin Weigert, reminds the commissioner who is a representative of the interests of Yankton of his human worth! Granted Jane is keen on the verbal smiting, and a particularly adept word-slinger when inebriated, but she’s especially fond of the commissioner in those regards - she can’t so much look at him without insulating him one way or another! And that he thinks he can rent the coat of Wild Bill Hickok, which Jane very much treasures (it being Wild Bill’s last-surviving possession), she let’s the commissioner know:

He might be proclaiming to be something that he’s not - for a laugh - but comedian John Lajoie’s YouTube video is a hit regardless (nearly 4 million views already), and he does a pretty good job of hitting the normal guy lifestyle nail on the head: has average parents, takes public transport, makes good pasta sauce, and possibly his most articulate rhyme:

I GET NERVOUS IN SOCIAL SITUATIONS, MOTHERFUCKER

(last time I had sex was in 2003, and I’m ashamed to it admit, but it wasn’t free)

Futurama: The Beast With a Billion Backs is the second movie installment of the Futurama series since Fox canceled production of the television show back in 2003. In Billion Backs the world is overran by an asexual tentacled creature that promotes “love” by spinal tapping the back-neck of its victims with its suction cupped appendages, and subjecting them to praise the tentacle. However Leela will have none of it, as she’s saving her neck “for a rich, handsome Dracula”.

In this scene Leela and Amy Wong narrowly escape an ambush by the tentacle-controlled Professor Hubert J. Farnsworth. Following one of the greatest pieces of animation in this movie - being chased down a canyon of future buildings in New New York City by Professor Wornstrom - Leela and Amy hide out in an alley, and after glancing at how much of life is controlled by the tentacles, including traffic cops, bus riders, fire hydrants and lizard walkers, Leela remarks on their status as perhaps the world’s only remaining normal people:

a cyclops born to subterranean-living mutant parents, and the lone child daughter of billionaire parents who own most of the real estate on Mars… yup, normal people!

Ubuntu is an operating system that has proclaimed itself to be Linux for Human Beings (as opposed to Linux for Linux Beings, or geeks or dweebs or dorks or l33t-p30pl3z as they may be affectionately called). Regardless of what species of Hominidae the sapiens Linus Torvalds intended his code to benefit, the Ubuntu project prides itself on being a version of Linux that is generally more-approachable by lay computer users to install on various computing devices as a free, open-source alternative to bloated & expensive proprietary operating systems (while still being a highly flexible and secure environment based on Debian).

Ubuntu’s screen resolution preferences contain an interesting reference:

Options for rotating displays are normally taken care of by the xorg.conf file. While many users report that the rotation option is not readily working, Ubuntu’s coders decided to refer to the default or standard monitor rotation orientation as… Normal.

If only more computing preferences were so simple a choice…

from HBO’s Deadwood, season 1 episode 6. In this scene Al Swearengen bursts in on a whore that has recently been in the company of a man who couldn’t “get it up” (Swearengen’s words), who paid a dollar for her to kill time in his company so as not to arouse any suspicion to his sickness. His sickness is an epidemic of smallpox whose outbreak in the camp is imminent.

The whore, who lost her mother to the “fucking plague” (also Swearengen’s) coming out West, after which her father gave her up and left her to her own devices, fears she herself may be dying. She’s in a panic. Thankfully Al’s logic is stoic, as he interprets her sad sad story to mean she cannot become contagious again. and grants her to “stick to handjobs for a day or two” instead of french fucking or normal:

Get the latest Flash Player to see this player.

GET BACK TO WORK!

Google Pages is part of the Google Labs initiative to build an online playground of web technologies that may or may not get integrated (it is a ‘lab’ after all) into the growing set of tools google has to offer beyond its comprehensive search engine (and mapping, and reader, and calendar, and advertising, and and and). Google Pages describes itself as ‘a free online tool that finally makes it easy for anyone to create and publish useful, attractive web pages in just minutes.’

It really is easy for anyone to create webpages without any HTML knowledge, thanks to the integrated WYSIWIG editor with clickable buttons, quick drop-down menus, and limited set of options for modifying your pages. Two of those options contain references to normal: the heading menu, which uses classes like h2, h3, h4 and p for paragraph or as googlepages call it, Normal - not Default; and the font size menu which has the options small, normal, large and huge - common terminology of CSS font properties.

thanks google for recognizing the potential of normal:

over at Adult Swim you can watch all your favorite smart, humorous and potentially offensive cartoons, streamed straight from the studio using Adobe’s Flash player technology. Adult Swim have smartly coded their player to quickly enlarge and browse other videos without the need to refresh the page. However this blog is intrigued by the nomenclature used to describe the player’s functions: notably, when the player is originally engaged, it has a clickable button that will enlarge the player to ‘full screen’. And when in full screen, and you are ready to return to what you were originally presented with, you do not ‘exit full screen’, nor ‘zoom to original’, but rather click ‘normal screen’.

fullscreen will always be different, depending on the user’s screen ratio and size. But normalscreen is the same for all! Yay for homogeneity, yay for normalscreen!

(click above image for my actual fullscreen screengrab)

[click here for Dethklok's Dethcarraldo]

Paraphrasing this article from The Economist (2007 Feb 24 edition), since 1980, humans’ fat-forming (and storing) processes have gone from normal to overdrive since the introduction of plastics and other synthetics as residual compounds in our diets.

who is Gordon Freeman?

the man ain’t just some ordinary regular joe schmoe kinda guy, running around in remote areas of America’s southwest, wearing a HEV suit battling government operatives and aliens alike. the man runs on CODE! (he’s also a MIT doctoral graduate!)

should you be in the midst of a battle with Combine cops, headcrabs or those howling fast zombies (they always frighten me to the point that I unload my machine-gun grenade right in my own face like BL0000SH!) then feel free to press ~tilde~ to access the game’s console commands, where you might find normal passing through.

[full-size on Flickr]

(

NORMλL

)

OBJECTION! Objection to use of the word “normal”!

Not my words. Rather the concern of the prosecutor in this scene from David Lynch’s Twin Peaks, season 2 episode 5, during the pre-trial of Leo Johnson who is currently in a vegetative state, which the defense is arguing makes him unfit to be tried, lacking what they call “normal brain activity”.

Get the latest Flash Player to see this player.

or was it Esc? or Del? or Alt+F10? or Fn+Ctrl+F11?

oh just hit all those buttons together, I’m sure something wonderful will happen!

(but Normal is the #1 choice for boot options)

Pedro Martinez is regarded as one of the best pitchers in major league baseball these days, and is a guaranteed future Hall of Famer. He’s a strikeout maestro, currently ranked 5th in active pitchers and 15th historically. He came off a two-month medical rehab yesterday, and pitched a quality-but-not-Pedro-quality game, allowing three runs, walking three and striking out three. Three strikeouts it would seem, is considered “mid-season normal” for Pedro Martinez. MLB reports:

The modest performance spoke for itself — six innings (109 pitches), seven hits, three runs, three walks, three strikeouts. His final 11 batters produced five of the seven hits. But he pitched out of trouble in the fifth and sixth innings. He allowed two runs in the fifth after the first three batters reached base. The first two reached base in the sixth. But neither scored.

“He saved his best pitches for when they put runners on base,” Castro said.

In that regard, Martinez was mid-season normal.

His stamina and velocity — he was at or close to 90 miles per hour on most of his fastballs — were good.

“He looked good. I don’t think he looked bad at all,” Giants shortstop Omar Vizquel said. “He was still throwing 90 miles an hour. I think at the beginning of the game he had a problem hitting his spots, but then he settled down a little and started pitching better.”

The more uplifting development was this, in Martinez’s words: “I came off the field in the same shape I went on.” No trace of a problem, he said. The left hamstring that betrayed him before he reached the fifth inning in April behaved properly. It even allowed Martinez to make a trip around the bases. He scored one of the Mets’ eight runs in the fifth inning and had two hits.

full text here

trackback to the game wrap considered mid-season normal

Normal is a movie featuring the foxy Carrie-Anne Moss of Matrix acclaim. (whoops! this image is probably more appropriate!)

As such, I will def give this movie a watch, and love a good drama. the plot reads:

NORMAL explores the lives of three strangers who are struggling for control, having failed to confront their roles in a tragic accident two years earlier. Catherine is a well-to-do suburban mother who has lost the ability to connect on any level with her surgeon husband and twelve-year-old son after the loss of her elder son. Walt is a failed writer and philandering university professor who deals with impending middle age and haunting memories by sabotaging every relationship around him. Jordie is a sensitive teenager who made a wrong choice one night and although he’s paid the price, still can’t halt his journey downward.

Normal movie IMDB entry

(drama…normal)

For Immediate Release
Office of the Press Secretary
December 27, 2001

Normal Trade Relations Treatment Executive Order
To Extend Nondiscriminatory Treatment to the Products of the People’s Republic of China
By the President of the United States of America
A Proclamation

1. The United States and the People’s Republic of China (China) opened trade relations in 1980. Since that time, the products of China have received nondiscriminatory treatment pursuant to annual waivers of the requirements of section 402 of the Trade Act of 1974 (the “Trade Act”) (19 U.S.C. 2432). Trade between the United States and China has expanded significantly even though China has maintained restrictions on market access for U.S. exports and investment.

2. On November 15, 1999, the United States and China agreed on certain terms and conditions for China’s accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO) that when implemented will eliminate or greatly reduce the principal barriers to trade and investment in China.

3. On November 9, 2001, pursuant to section 101(b) of Public Law 106-286, 114 Stat. 881, I transmitted a report to the Congress certifying that the terms and conditions for the accession of China to the WTO are at least equivalent to those agreed between the United States and China on November 15, 1999. On November 10, 2001, the Ministerial Conference of the WTO approved the terms and conditions for China’s accession and invited China to become a member of the WTO. China has accepted these terms and conditions and became a WTO member on December 11, 2001.

4. Pursuant to section 101(a)(1) of Public Law 106-286, 114 Stat. 881, I hereby determine that chapter 1 of title IV of the Trade Act should no longer apply to China.

NOW, THEREFORE, I, GEORGE W. BUSH, President of the United States of America, acting under the authority vested in me by the Constitution and the laws of the United States, including but not limited to sections 101(a)(2) and 102(a) of Public Law 106-286, 114 Stat. 881, do hereby proclaim that:

(1) Nondiscriminatory treatment (normal trade relations treatment) shall be extended to the products of China; and

(2) The extension of nondiscriminatory treatment to the products of China shall be effective as of January 1, 2002.

IN WITNESS WHEREOF, I have hereunto set my hand this twenty-seventh day of December, in the year of our Lord two thousand one, and of the Independence of the United States of America the two hundred and twenty-sixth.
GEORGE W. BUSH

[via whitehouse.gov]