It’s Fooble-mint, Fooble-mint, Fooble-mint gum!

For those of you who are not of Generation X, that is what is known as a reference.

Look it up in some kind of book.

Heya hiya howdy, folks, and welcome to that brief respite from sanity known as the Sunday Fooble Hours, brought to you courtesy of Foobco, the Fun Folks to Know. Remember kids, when you think of asparagus used in suggestive ways, think Foobco!

Then call your doctor.

You know what I love? Random acts of wonder. Things that people do just to add a little sparkle and mystery and magic to the lives of others. Anonymous, selfless, completely sincere acts of public wonderfulness.

Like the odd and mysterious paper sculptures showing up around Edinburgh.

I could be wrong about the motive, of course. Perhaps it’s not an act of public wonder but the inevitable byproduct of a brilliant but tortured orgamist’s all-consuming obsession, and what were are seeing are not works of art donated to the public consciousness but symptoms of a mind slowly coming apart.

But I prefer to think that this person wanted to share their hobby with the world, but in a way that would give people something to talk about and wonder about and that would make their days just a little brighter and more interesting.

Nothing harmful or destructive. Just a something a little different, to make this day unlike all the others. A gift.

Then again, sometimes these sort of things are motivated by a simple need to be heard on a subject of local interest. Say, a local eyesore that desperately needs to go away, so desperately that you are willing to get together with a bunch of friends and perform a simply breathtaking act of public art as commentary.

I am gobstruck with awe for the people who did that. It’s not just a marvelously elegant commentary that anyone seeing it can understand. It is a highly daring and presumably quite dangerous stunt that I am thinking required at least three people to pull off. So it took planning and coordination as well.

All to say “this ugly old thing has got to go”.

I have crazy mad respect for people who are that passionate in their desire to make a statement, and who do it in such a powerful and peaceful way.

After all, it’s not like they destroyed anything of value, nor did they make the ugly old dam any uglier. They just added a very simple comment that hurt nobody but made their point clearly and even somewhat humorously.

Then again, some people don’t need to make statements in order to be heard, because they are the butchest human being alive and other people will do all the telling for them.

Like this guy here.

Quick, someone call Stephen Colbert!

Kind of makes Davey Crockett look like a big fat pussy, doesn’t it?

Sure, he “got him a bar when he was only three”, but did he do it by taking it on bare-handed and ripping out its throat with his teeth?

I didn’t think so.

Animal lover that I am, I have no problem with people defending themselves. I don’t feel bad for the bear. We human beings are top predator for a reason. We are really fucking dangerous. If the animals leave us alone, we can be civilized.

But cross the line and attack us, and suddenly it’s all about the law of the jungle.

Is it just me, or have I completely failed to keep a light and jocular tone this week?

Oh well. Here’s some intensely nerdy humour to lighten the mood.

You remember high school algebra, right?

You see, it’s funny because the square root of negative one is an imaginary number because there can be no number that when multiplied by itself results in a negative number. Square a positive number, you get a positive number. Square a negative number, a negative number times a negative number is always positive, ergo, still a positive number.

So you can see, it can be mathematically demonstrated, without the possibility of error, that the above joke is completely hilarious.

If you still don’t find it funny, you must just hate math.

That’s all the stuff I have for you this week, all you fun people out there. Time to clean up, turn out the lights, lock the doors, and play a little wistfully sad piano music to signal the network that we are done for now.

Seeya next week folks!

Today comes at the end of one hell of a week for mind-bending (and mind-reading!) science. I have had a hell of a time narrowing the field down to only the most neuron-tingling ganglion-tickling future-tastic stories for your edification and stimulation this week.

I mean, take this story about the latest development in the field of rapid prototyping or 3D printing : assault rifle parts, and a freaking Stradivarius!

We will deal with the Strad first. Yes, it happened. Some people took a super precise scan of a genuine Stradivarius violin, the greatest violins ever made, and then someone else printed it out and gave it a try.

How did it sound? You be the judge.

I love the setting. Music in a meadow. Lovely.

As for the sound, it sounds fine to me, but then again what do I know? But nobody is claiming it’s just like the real thing. For one thing, it’s made of industrial plastics, not wood and varnish and so on. It is more the idea of it that is important, the idea that some day, rare and precious objects might well be only a few mouse clicks away.

And also rare and dangerous things. An assault rifle is a highly precise machine, and yet people are taking them apart and scanning parts of them and putting them up on the Internet. We’re far from being able to print our own AK-47s (where would the cordite come from, for one) but the real issue is that the precisely machined, painstakingly designed parts of a modern assault rifle represent thousands of man-hours and millions of dollars of research and development, and a future in which anyone can get that for free from the Net is a very different kind of future indeed.

Or how about this? Some highly clever people have come up with a highly promising design for a perpetual hydrogen fuel cell that requires only salt water and fresh water to keep on making hydrogen microbially potentially forever.

I am still not entirely sold on the idea of a hydrogen future, but something like this could certainly make it more of a possibility. The technical details are neat but complicated, but all you need to know is that as long as you have salt water in one side and fresh water in the other, the salinity difference between the two gives the setup the extra juice it needs to keep the microbes happily eating waste and farting out hydrogen.

Yes…. the future may be powered by germ farts. Deal with it.

But neither of those can hold a metaphorical candle, or a real one for that matter (news stories have no hands), to this freaky bit of brain science : the first glimpse into a machine than can actually read your mind and display what you are seeing on a TV screen.

Holy Sixties Science Fiction, man.

Because this is the first good result, the images produced don’t look a whole lot like what the person is actually seeing, but they look enough like it to give anyone the willies.

Check this shit out, kiddies :

Clearly, while nobody would want to watch the reconstruction, it’s only a matter of refining the process before you are getting clearly recognizable images from inside someone’s brain.

This is the sort of science that both blows my mind and scares the shit out of me.

On the positive side, I imagine a future where someone (maybe even someone like little old me) could make a whole movie simply by imagining the images in their mind. And if they can do images, would sound be far behind?

On the negative side, reading someone’s mind is the ultimate violation of privacy imaginable. Even in the most repressive fascist states, despite all their efforts, they could not control what went on inside someone’s mind. In your mind, you were free.

In the future, maybe, not so much.

But as thrilling as that is, for sheer wondrous WTF-ness, nothing beats the big news out of CERN that recent routine neutrino experiments seem to show neutrons moving faster than the speed of light.

Gee, Mister Einstein, isn’t that impossible?

Admittedly, this story is a few days old now, and by now, they might well have figured that it was all a case of human error, instrument malfunction, or something else that is completely mundane and stupid and absolutely no fun whatsoever.

But I am hoping against hope that this is totally real and we have just broken one of the biggest rules in physics and a whole new theory will be needed to account for this, because I am the sort of person who is absolutely thrilled by the discovery of the unknown and the moments when we, as a curious species, are forced to go “What the fuh…. this makes no sense at all!” and throw our hands in the air and admit we don’t know everything.

Plus hey, if neutrons can go faster than light, maybe we can too, and what kind of science fiction guy would I be if I was not super excited at the prospect of real, actual FTL?

But mostly, I just love the edges of knowledge, and am thrilled by the discovery of big, fat, juicy mysteries that reveal the majesty and wonder of the universe, and remind us that we are but children in this big complicated universe.

Dark matter. Dark energy. The universe’s expansion speeding up. And now neutrons moving faster than the speed of light.

The whole thing makes me downright giddy. It makes me want to laugh and laugh and shout “We don’t know anything! Isn’t it wonderful?”

I imagine others would be more angered or disturbed by this sort of thing. But for a thinker like me, it is the most marvelous thing in the world : a genuine mystery.

Ain’t science neat?

Here it is, another foobtastic Sunday, and under a light gray sky, a herd of brand new foobs comes thundering over the horizon! Lo, from the majestic plains of Foobstar Fells to the gently rolling hills of the Fertile Fooblands stretches a grand and ragged line of Fantastical Funny Friendly Foobs, each one holding the tail of the one in front and having its own tail held by the one behind, and at the front of the herd, tendril flanges proudly a-flapping in the breeze, stands the might and majestic Alpha Foob, and her haram of eighty husbands close (but not too close) behind.

God, I wish Marlin Perkins were alive to film it.

And speaking, as we nearly were, of our friends in the animal kingdom, we have a few fun and frolicsome animal clips to share with you today, gentle readers (and a few of you crusty old farts too). Like this one, which illustrates the comedic potential of a dog’s complete and total lack of self-awareness or irony.

Are those some adorable LOLs or what? A sweet and innocent little doggie plus a little help from our friend Mister Static Electricity and voila, laughs galore. The sight of his pretty white fur poofing out and turning him into a living three dimensional asterisk is funny enough, but combined with his completely innocent and clueless expression (because, after all, he has no idea anything is happening besides everyone paying attention to him for some reason after he gets extra pets) is total comedy gold. Damn near everything with nominal brain function will find that charming and hilarious.

I bet everyone who visits that household gets to see that little trick if they are around for long enough and are making a good impression.

As pet tricks go, it’s a winner.

Sticking with our friendly friends of the canine persuasion, you will be happy to know that recent advances in subtitling technology have allowed us to finally understand what our pets are saying to us, or in this case, one another.

Warning, there’s a lot of doggy noises like barking and howling in this one, so you might wanna turn it down if you have sensitive nerves or cats or both.

The clip is both cute and funny, but a lot more cute than funny, admittedly. The dogs (I think they are Malamutes) are gorgeous and cute as hell, and that is mostly what carries it, although the “dialogue” is funny in parts. Needs an ending though, something to send it off with a punchline or at least a finale.

Perhaps the dog who wants to play calling the other “bitch”. Corny, but what the hell.

It really does seem like they are trying to literally talk to one another, doesn’t it? Because they are not just barking and it’s not quite howling either. It’s “ah-woo-woo-wooing”, for lack of an official term. I imagine living with it is a tad hard on the nerves, but it is interesting to hear for a short clip.

And last on today’s foob parade, we have this little slice of comedy about the weird world in which we live, and how strangely different it is from the far stranger world in which television ads seem to exist.

Having one person in the ad react like a normal person would if their friend suddenly began talking to nobody about some drug is hardly a fresh and original concept. I have seen it done as far back as Uncle Milty, and that’s a long time.

Still, I thought they did a pretty good take on the whole drug commercial thing, and so I decided it was worth sharing. Plus, they keep the madness going fairly well. I like the idea of drug commercial psychosis.

Side effects of reading today’s blog entry may (but shouldn’t) include lightheadedness, drowsiness, feelings of mirth, irritable bowel texts, darkness around the perineum, superego, friendly fire, temporary loss of inhibitions, running off at the mouth like that bitch of a wife my boss has got, unemployment, depression, revelation, and no longer giving the tiniest of fucks about anything.

If these or another other symptoms of absolutely any kind, including imaginary, psychosomatic, or physically impossible, please consult your physician, nurse-practioner, or whoever else you let stick thing in you while you’re naked.

Ask them whether Foobatrex is right for you, or whether it might just be a sex thing.

That’s all for this week, foob fans. Remember, if the women don’t find you handsome, try men. You never know!

Hi there science fans! We’ve got a Severe Weather Warning here in Friday Science Roundup land, and the forecast calls for another heavy rainfall where the waters is made of pure undiluted concentrated SCIENCE NEWS!

So put on your raincoat, slip into those old yellow rubber boots, quack twice like a duck and once like a very silly person who is quacking for no good reason, and leave the umbrella in the closet by the door, because before we are done, you will be soaking wet with SCIENCE!

You know, but just your head. Because the rest of you is in a raincoat and boots.

Metaphors are so complicated.

First up, in pretty good news, Japan’s richest man is launching an insane plan to make Japan’s energy grid at least 60 percent renewable.

The nutty billionaire in question is Masayoshi Son, founder of Softbank and richer than a Frenchman’s last meal. His plan calls for massive amounts of wind turbines (makes sense for an island nation with tons of coastline) and geothermal (makes sense when said island nation is full of, and made by, volcanoes) and the abandonment of nuclear.

I am pro-nuclear, so I don’t know about that last part, although I am also for whatever works best. But the thing is, this guy’s plan is insanely ambitious and expensive (to the tune of $26 billion, with a b, dollars) and he’s only talking about maybe contributing one percent of that from his own funds.

So bravo, Rich Dude, for wanting to do something big, but boo hiss for thinking you can do it on the cheap. Where is the rest of that money going to come from? Heaven? You have the right idea, but you have to go all the way with this. Show the world the ultimate expression of wealth : doing something not even governments can do.

Use those billions to save the world and the global economy with one hell of a stimulus package! And dare other billionaires to follow suit.

Next, we have a headline to blow your mind : using AIDS to kill cancer.

Seriously! It has been done. Researchers took about a billion immune-system T-cells from a very ill leukemia patient named William Ludwig, used a variant of the AIDS virus, HIV, to deliver cancer fighting information to them, and then put them back in.

At first, nothing happened. Then, all hell broke loose and Ludwig got very, very ill for two weeks with something a lot like a very nasty flu. And then said flu disappeared.

And with it, went his leukemia. All of it. Just plain gone.

It is early innings yet, but if this works out, it could represent the first step towards the Holy Grail of oncology : the ability to train the body’s own immune system to kill cancer cells. Cancer’s whole schtick is that it looks just like a healthy cell to our immune systems, and if that could be changed, we could wipe cancer out.

And cancer patients are (sadly) already used to being very ill for months from their chemo. Being very ill for a couple of weeks to be maybe cancer-free would be nothing.

And finally, the big big one of this last week : Scottish scientists are attempting to use non-organic molecules to make non-organic life.

That’s right : they are going to take things which are not life and make life out of them.

THEY HAVE THIS KNOWLEDGE.

Or at least, they think they will have it soon. Holy crap, Scotland!

The project is led by Professor Lee Cronin, and they plan to take their inorganic lego kit and bodge together

“…an inorganic cell, in which internal membranes control the movement of energy and materials, just as in a living cell. These cells can also store electricity and could be used in medicine and chemistry as sensors or to contain chemical reactions.”

Mind-boggling isn’t it? Taking bits and pieces and making a new life form from scratch? I have to admit to being a little scared of the implications. We know so little of ecology, what if we make something we can’t control?

But Grey Goo fears aside, what I particularly like about this story is the potential effect on Drake’s equation. I have long suspected that what we think of as organic life is only one possible path towards the self-organizing principle of big-L Life itself, and this suggests I may have been right.

Who knows what forms of “inorganic” life we might find out there some day? For all we know, that might be the majority, and our path the aberration.

If so, I hope the future alien races we meet can forgive us the charmingly naive provincialism of calling our form of life “Life”.

After all, we’re new at this.

That’s it for this week, folks! Tune in next week, when we will discuss how to use magnets to keep people from lying!

Every election, people are told exactly what it is they need to do in order to gain more political power, to be put into the driver’s seat in every voting season, to be the people the politicians listen to and care about, and to join the true ruling class of a democracy.

But it seems like only around a third of people get the message. This elite group instinctively understands what it means to mean something in the democratic process and is perfectly willing to forgo the easy, common pleasures of political inadequacy and go for the harder but more rewarding road less traveled. And these are the people who reap their just rewards for their courage and fortitude.

These are the people everyone wants to talk to. These are the people politicians court, news networks examine, talk shows try to get on as often as they can, and learned people write volumes of thoughtful analysis attempts to predict.

They are, in fact, what modern democracy is all about. They are its heart, its mind, its soul, and most importantly, its voting hand.

They are the people who swing.

They are the swing voters, and in modern democracy, they are the only people who count.

Why should any politician listen to a word his party loyalists say? Those sixty six percenters who will absolutely, positively, never ever EVER vote for the other side and ergo also votes the exact same party, every single time, unfailing and unfaltering.

And worst of all, unthinking, uncritical, undemanding, and completely unimportant.

These people actually volunteer for irrelevancy. By simply abandoning the notion of political choice and simply voting for the party they have always voted for, by choosing a side and sticking with it come what may, they reduce politics to nothing but a sports team and political activity to nothing but “Rah Team A! Boo Team B!”.

As a result, in the minds of all politicians, these people are nothing more than wallpaper, or at best, purely cannon fodder. They are taken as completely for granted as being taken for granted can be said to go. Politicians pay less attention to them than a NASCAR driver does to the faces of the fans whipping past at 200 miles an hour.

And yet, nobody is forcing them to take this position. They take it, and maintain it, entirely of their own free will. Perhaps when they were younger, they bothered to keep an open mind on all things. But with age comes weariness, and freedom takes energy.

Best to just remember what team you support and show up on game day wearing the right colored jersey and otherwise don’t give it a bit of thought. Right?

After all, it’s only freedom and democracy. It’s not something important, like television, or hard candy, or blankets you can wear like clothes.

But maybe they want to change. Maybe they want to stop being the turtles supporting yet another King Yertle.

Maybe, in fact, you see a little of yourself in the description I am offering, and are wondering if it is possible to leave the camp of the unimportant and join the camp of the shining, wonderfully relevant movers and shakers.

Yes you can! And it is very simple, although by no means very easy.

You simply have to abandon all political parties.

And when I say abandon, I mean completely. You have to do your best to banish them from your mind, to remove them from your thinking entirely.

You must forget whatever party you usually support. You owe them nothing. They are the exact people who have been taking you for granted all these years. You don’t have to be loyal to them. It is not like they have been loyal to you.

Even harder, you must forget the party you usually hate. People will give up their loves before they give up their hates every time. But you cannot hope to be free if you eliminate all possibilities but one.

You must also forget worrying about who is going to win. You exert exactly the same amount of force on the system whether you vote for the winners or not. You wouldn’t respect a supposed sports fan who always roots for whatever team is winning at the time, would you?
Then how can you respect a voter who wants to vote for the winner?

Most importantly, you must abandon the notion that voting for a small party means “throwing your vote away”. Both capitalism and democracy are served best by having the most competition that the market can bear. Having only two options is nowhere near good enough.

All this abandonment of archaic Team A versus Team B thinking will not be easy. We human beings are a deeply tribal species, and the urge to pick a side and join a team and support that team come what may is very strong in us. In order to become a swing voter, you have to abandon the comfort and security we feel when we are part of a strong tribal group and stand alone, tribeless and exposed, and decide for ourselves what we believe and who best represents those beliefs.

And be willing to change our allegiance at any moment, despite the tribal voices in our minds who accuse us of being disloyal, equivocal, flighty, or lost in the cold.

Only then can enough people make the politicians work hard enough for their votes that they might have to actually represent the majority from now on.

Only true post-party politics can lead to the rise of true democracy, where the people truly rule, instead of merely being asked which politician might screw them over less every four years or so.

Only if we are willing to walk away from team based politics and look the politicians in the eye and say “Convince me.” will we be able to turn democratic government truly into the will of the people.

Picking a political party is as meaningless as picking numbers for a lottery or picking which horse to bet on at the track.

Decide what you believe in, what you trust, what you want to see happen, and only when you are sure of that do you even glance at the menu of options before you.

Walk away from the chains that bind you, and you can be part of making your democracy, and through it your world, a much better place.

You just have to be willing to swing.

Guess what? Here I am, at Writing Time, and instead of being bright eyed, bushy tailed, and mildly curious about when exactly I got a tail, I am all super sleepy and ready to curl up into a ball and lapse into a coma for, of, no more than a few centuries.

Stupid sleep apnea. Stupid random sleep patterns. Stupid total lack of structure in my life combined with getting almost no sunshine and having little to no self-discipline or ability to stick to a routine meaning my Circadian rhythms are syncopated to the point of cacophony.

Stupid excessively elaborate vocabulary.

Right now, I feel like I wanna go find this Mister Sandman asshole and tag him in the junk with a crowbar.

Although if he brings me a “dream, and makes him the cutest that I’ve even seen”, I might just be willing to call it even.

Had session number 2 with Doctor Costin today. Went fine. I like him. He seems like the sort of therapist I need. Willing to challenge me and ask the awkward questions and basically be that vital Other, the person who can ask me the questions that only someone outside my brain (unlike you nice people) can see to ask.

It is hard to fix your own broken mind, because your mind is broken.

At one point, he put forth the idea that my avoidant tendencies might lead to me “forgetting” an appointment with him.

I tried to get the idea across to him that no, therapy is the most important thing in my life right now, and I am in no ways ambivalent about it, so there’s no chance I will avoid the therapy like I might avoid other social situations.

Plus, honestly, I am quite comfortable in therapy. Well, as comfortable as one can be when digging through one’s personality like an archeologist looking for the buried ancient treasure that is slowly driving the locals insane with its dread eldritch energies.

Hmmm, mental note : just had a good idea for an episode of X-files.

But therapy does not bother me. I understand the process quite well, I am completely sure I want to be there, I am not a person with a big problem talking about myself, and honestly, as sad as this is, I really appreciate a solid hour of someone paying attention to me.

Some day, this desperate need for attention will get me in serious trouble. It’s my thirsty dog, the insatiable need that burns in me and satiating it seems impossible.

I did not get a lot of attention as a child, and it seems that set up a pattern of eternal need in me. Pay attention to me! Listen to me! Value me! Validate me! LOVE ME MOM!

That will have to come up in therapy too. Next appointment is 8:15 AM on the 22nd, so not this Thursday but the next. I can hardly wait.

Otherwise, things have been mellow. Watched a couple of very bad movies with my dear friend, the glamorous and fascinating Felicity.

One was a movie called Night Raiders, or its original title, Night of the Kickboxers.

There is not much kickboxing, to be honest. So right there, it’s already lying.

It was a very bad movie, but luckily for us, it was the good kind of bad, the kind that makes you laugh at how incredibly inept and terrible it is. The movie includes some of the worst “acting” I have ever heard, with some of the most bizarre line reads that place the emphasis on entirely the wrong words, as well as some of the clunkiest and most unnatural dialogue and a villainess struggling with so much bad accept, she’s nearly incomprehensible. And of course, being expected to thing the Middle East and Arizona look exactly the same.

The nuggets of goodness : Adam West as a scientist whose daughter is kidnapped so the bad guys can get their hands on his big, powerful laser, and for us Star Trek and/or Addams Family fans, it also features Carel Struycken, who played both the enigmatic Mister Homm, Lwaxana Troi’s ever-present, ever-silent personal assistant, on all the modern Star Trek series, and was also Lurch in the modern Addams Family movies.

For those wondering, he does actually speak. In this movie, he quite clearly says “With pleasure!”. Two whole words! I was beginning to wonder if he’s mute.

Wow, it’s dark out, and it’s only 8pm. Summer truly is over.

A perfect time for that coma I was talking about! Seeya later, readers.

Hey there, happy campers!

Welcome aboard the Star Ship Foobleprize! Please observe all safety instructions, because frankly some of them are hilarious, and obey all directions from our air stewards, stewardesses, safety personnel, online entertainers, professional proctophiles, pregnant yak massagers, and anyone else who seems like a nice person who knows what they are doing.

As usual, when we break the light barrier, some of you will be required to fix it. After all, someone else is going to want to break it and we believe in being a responsible corporation practically as much as is legally required of us.

Our first stop today is real sweet spot known as the panties mystery!

You have to love a story like this. Thousands of pairs of panties have shown up on the sides of roads in central Ohio, and nobody knows where they came from or who put them there.

Some of them appear to be still folded like they would be in their original packaging, but others appear to have been “used”. They were in a wide variety of colors and patterns, and were found in four separate locations.

And thus, the mystery unfolds : 1,500 to 3,000 pairs of panties show up out of nowhere, and people want to know what the heck is going on.

My guess, and that’s all it is, is that a fetishist, possibly even a panty thief, either had to get rid of their “collection” super quick, or someone (possibly a wife or mother) discovered said “collection” and did the disposing themselves, under protest.

Under this theory, the panty disposer used four locations because they were acutely aware that being seen dumping panties by the sorority’s-worth on the side of the road might strike a few passing drivers as peculiar, and so they just pulled up to a random spot, chucked a whole bunch of them out, then zoomed off again.

Heck, they might not even have come to a complete stop.

Next up, we have a simply mindboggling artifact of complete and total dorkiness from another age, a link I got from a highly appropriate source : click this link and learn about learning the accordion is the best thing for a young boy… from a comic book.

Not only a comic book, but a professional made one, not just some horrible crude thing some accordion salesman’s nephew scratched out. The whole thing reads like a highly polished accordion lesson salesman’s pitch transmogrified into a comic book that makes Chick Tracts seem subtle in their approach.

One can’t help but imagine the hours of childhood misery spent learning the least cool musical instrument in the world unleashed by the propaganda power of this little comic.

And I have to admit, the world depicted in the comic is a false one, but it seems like a nice place, where all you need is an accordion and you get popularity, social confidence, and of course, hordes of mad accordion groupies eager to slake your most perverse lusts.

Granted, the comic doesn’t come right out and say that, but I think it’s clearly implied.

Oh, and the highly appropriate link source? None other than Weird Al himself, who has used his own childhood accordion misery to reap fame, fortune, and a closet full of Hawaiian shirts in every color in the rainbow.

And now, for the cuteness content for today’s episode, we present the most adorable owl you have ever seen.

Awww! And I don’t normally find birds all that cute, but anything that small has a massive bonus to its cuteness score, especially when it’s being playful and affectionate.

Now that you have enjoyed that video, check out this one :

Now is it my imagination, or did Barney Rubble just make a dick joke?

It’s hard to tell. You can certainly interpret it that way, and once you do, it’s hard to imagine it any other way.

But it might just be very inept humour. Ha ha, see what I did there? I joked like I had two heads. What a wacky funster.

Finally, a link to a site based on hate, but not of a race, religion, creed, color, or even what lame bands you have in your mp3 player.

It’s a site all about hating on that horrible nightmare of a vehicle, the H2, and is called, lovingly, Fuck You And Your H2.

I have a soft spot for this sort of site, and honestly, the H2 is probably the most retarded nightmare of a clusterfuck of a vehicle ever, so it’s not undeserved.

I particularly like the solicitation of photos of people giving an H2 the finger.

That adds just the right touch of class, you know?

That’s it for this week, fooble followers! Stayed tuned for next week’s episode, where I will attempt to crossbreed an elephant with a Buick Roadmaster.

The usual. Had a more ambitious idea, too tired now, yadda yadda doo. From now on, let’s just take it as a given that if the blog entry is a little less than editorially bulletproof, it is because I am not a healthy person in either mind or body (or spirit, or soul, or essence) and my problems done caught up with me again and gave me a whuppin’.

So instead of the impressively deep and penetrating exploration of whatever the hell I had in mind that I had in mind, I will share with you some cool videos I have come across recently, as well, of course, as my trenchant and scintillating analysis thereof.

I spoil you people, I really do.

First up in our little show is this, the winning entry in this years Nokia Shorts competition, supposedly shot entirely on one of their Nokia cellphones.

If that is the case, the video quality on these things is getting fantastic.

Splitscreen: A Love Story from JW Griffiths on Vimeo.

Not exactly a genius of narrative or a film with an awful lot to say to us, but it is only slightly longer than its central concept is interesting, and I am, again, impressed with the high quality of the video. This is not your father’s choppy, grainy cell phone video!

I guess that’s one of the battlegrounds of the cell phone world now, video quality. Isn’t fierce competition between big companies great? They duke it out and you get fresh miracles in your cell phone every year.

What’s with the music in that short, though? It seems lately that to have indie appeal, all flim has ot have to same sort of twinkly gentle dreamy sentimental music, which almost always features piano and that formerly rarely heard instrument, the glockenspiel.

In fact, the glockenspiel is rapidly becoming to our era what funky chicken bass guitar was to the seventies.

I wonder if that means it will start showing up in porn movies?

Next up in our program (programme if you are British) is this quite interesting trailer for a movie with, I think, a quite brilliant concept for a movie, specifically, a brilliant idea for a cheap indie movie without much special effects that nevertheless leverages science fiction in order to make something with potential for massive impact and depth.

It is called Ghosts With Shit Jobs, and while it is not exactly what comes to mind when you read that, it still seems pretty cool to me.

The idea is that in the future, the year 2040, the economy of the United States has been completely destroyed and all prosperity has fled East, to China and India. What is left of the population of America lives in the ruins of a once great civilization, picking over the bones of the USA and making money doing shitty jobs that nobody in Asia would be willing to do at any price.

Genius. It’s something you can shoot with no budget, just a camera and some friends, and yet with the right acting and script, it could be something that really resonates with the world of today and the fears of every American suffering through hard times right now.

It’s not clear at this point whether this is a real trailer for a munch longer movie, or whether the trailer is the movie and that is all there will ever be.

I kind of hope the trailer is the whole thing. As a trailer, it gets its key ideas across powerfully and simply. If you made this be a whole movie, it might get pretty tired.

Still, if it was a full length movie, I would still want to see it.

Finally, purely because this video came to mind recently and because it is one of the most wonderfully satisfying things you will ever see, here is Pimp Versus Karate Expert.

Oh yes, yes, yes, yes, fuck yes, yes, YES.

Is there anything more wonderful than seeing a woman-beating asshole pimp getting smacked down by someone who seems weaker and smaller than him but is actually a small but powerful package of complete and total bastard-wrecking MAYHEM?

Taste the white hot reverse half moon punch of INSTANT MOTHEFUCKING JUSTICE, scumbag!

I love how he gets up all wobbly and messed up, and manages to still keep his “I am tough and badass and not scared of you” face on while he “lets” the hooker lead him off.

You front little bitch, I hope he did permanent damage.

Is it Friday again already? Wow. And so forth.

Enough chitchat, it’s science time!

First, we have to start off with the Cardboard Cathedral.

Amongst the many terrible consequences of this year’s massive earthquake in Christchurch, in New Zealnd (a place that did not need yet another damned disaster) was the total destruction of the world famous Christchurch Cathedral.

This was a terrible loss both to the world of classic Christian architecture and, more importantly, the Catholic community of Christchurch, who were suddenly without a place in which to practice their faith.

Enter cardboard innovator Shigeru Ban, who says that he can build an entire working cathedral out of cardboard and it would only take three months and cost $3.4 million.

That sounds like a lot of money, but I am pretty sure that a real cathedral made of stone and glass costs a hell of a lot more than that these days, and this is only meant to be a temporary replacement while a proper, traditional cathedral is built.

Ban insists cardboard is cheap, plentiful, easy to get your hands on in large quantities in disaster-stricken areas where (understandably but cruelly) building material prices tend to go through the roof, and makes a perfectly acceptable emergency building material.

It would be made of massive cardboard tubes and sit on a foundation of used freight containers, and be built to last the whole ten years it would take to build a new cathedral.

Now I know what you are thinking. This sounds completely insane, not to mention gross and amazingly tacky. I confess, my own open-mindedness abotu the subject of alternative building methods took a hit when I first read about this idea.

Visions of something that looks like a group of homeless children were gripped by religious fervor and bodged together something out of cardboard boxes and used staples, with “chirch” scrawled on the side in Sharpie, comes to mind.

And I mean, what would it look like inside? What would it feel like? Hell, what would it smell like? Sure, I know it’s not used cardboard, but cardboard itself does not smell all that great in large quantity.

So I am assuming that all the cardboard has some sort of coating on it to make it less, well, cardboard-y. Something cheap that you spray on which seals it against the weather and makes it more like building with a very light wood.

It still sounds highly dubious to me, but I am a big fan of all attempts to innovate in the world of housing. If we can find a cheaper way to make houses, it could have an amazingly positive rippling effect on damn near everything.

Imagine if a new house cost around the same as a new car. What a difference that would make!

Next up, turns out that those probiotic formulae being hawked in everything these days might do more than promote healthy digestion, they might also help mellow you out.

Turns out, your own little personal ecosystem of gut bacteria could have an effect on your mood. The study cited in the above link fed one of the most popular probiotics, a friendly little fellow called Lactobacillus rhamnosus, to some mice, and found that said mice were way less stressed out in situations mice normally find stressful.

This seems promising, especially for yogurt companies, but we have to keep in mind that the causal link has been demonstrated but not explained. How, exactly, does the bacterial help the mice be more calm? Perhaps all it does is improve their digestion, and that alone makes them calmer because their little tummies are calmer.

And finally, in the realm of Gross As Hell But Not Technically Wrong, a funeral home in Florida is offering yet another way to dispose of human remains : liquefaction.

I will not go into the gory details. Not in the mood today. Suffice it to say that through heat and pressure, they melt the flesh right off the bone.

And this is the truly mind raping bit : then they pour you down the drain.

Yes, the same drain down which we pour, say, spoiled gravy.

The company that makes the device that makes all this marvelous science possible (the Resomator, which sounds like an excellent Doctor Who villain) assures us that liquid person is completely ecologically safe and that their process uses way less energy and produces way less greenhouse gas than a standard cremation.

Oh, and yes, that still leaves your skeleton, which is pulverized, and any metal you might have in your body.

Again, gross, but not actually wrong per se. But I wouldn’t go for it and I can’t imagine too many people wanted their dear departed loved ones melted like that.

Right now, I am still wanting to be composted when I am gone. Just put my left-behind flesh back into the ecosystem. I am not using it any more.

That is all for this week, folks. Aren’t you glad?

Been thinking a lot about this subject recently, so I thought I would put some of said thoughts down here. in my bloggy little blog, to help sort them out and maybe turn them into something that makes to people who live outside my brain.

That’s most of you, right?

As with a lot of deep philosophical thoughts, this begins with martial arts movies.

One of the things stressed in martial arts movies and a lot of other media dealing with Eastern religion and other acetic disciplines is that you can only achieve these advanced levels of enlightenment and awesomeness by many, many years of gruelingly hard training, discipline, meditation, and suffering.

And a big part of me has always rebelled against this idea. What is the big deal? Why can’t you just teach me what you know now? Sure, maybe it took you decades of self-deprivation and meditation and flagellation to learn it, but that doesn’t mean I have to do the exact same thing in order to learn it. You could just tell me, and then I would know too, and without a lot of pointless suffering and enduring a life that basically sucks balls.

Or is it that you are pissed off that it took you so long to learn things which are actually really simple and obvious once you know them, and now you want other people to have to suffer like you in order to make it all seem worth it?

And it’s a nice racket, stringing people along, making them be your eager disciples and making your life way easier by just selling them on the idea that you are wise and powerful and can teach them the secrets if they just hang around and do absolutely everything you say for a long enough time.

“No, grasshopper…. you are not yet ready to learn the next big secret… ask me again next year. And make sure not to burn the rice this time, bitch. ”

By the time they figure out you don’t know anything that any moron could figure out in ten minutes, they have already invested so much of their life in your service that they are emotionally compelled to keep going.

“OK, that last bit of wisdom was crap, but I am sure the next one will be important… better not burn the rice this time… ”

And the thing is, part of me still thinks like that, but I have realized recently that the problem is that, as an intellectual, I don’t value experience nearly as much as I value knowledge (or wisdom, or understanding, or whatever you want to call it).

In fact, I am beginning to see this as a failing typical of intellectuals in general : we think that if you know the destination, the journey is a waste of time you should minimize as much as possible so you can go on the to the next thing as soon as possible.

The journey itself, and whatever experiences you might have on it, hold no value whatsoever. Even though we all know damned well that in our own lives, we have had many experiences that have changed us profoundly, some positive and some negative, we continue to think that what matters is what you learn, not what you do, and if you could have learned the same thing faster, that would have been better.

The metaphor that comes to mind to explain this folly : A man takes a long journey from his village to the big city, and as he takes his first step into the city, he exclaims “What a fool I have been! Obviously, I should have taken this step first, and saved myself the rest of the trip!”

Oh well, next time you’ll know, right?

Everything we do, even if we do nothing, changes us. The river never stops flowing and carves new channels, or makes the old ones deeper.

And therefore, some changes in us can only be wrought by experiencing certain things. You can’t skip the middle simply because you know the ending. It is an experience that will change you, not simply an insight or a technique.

You have to actually change who you are and not just what you know.

And to an intellectual (who probably thinks of themselves as open-minded and freethinking) change of self is the most frightening kind of change and is to be blindly and ferociously avoided at all costs.

And so we end up going around and around in the same big circles over and over again, all the while thinking we are finding something new.

Big brains do not solve all problems.

Sometimes, you have to let things happen to you instead.