Some weird stuff going on in my head today. Thought I’d share.

You lucky, lucky people.

It started with this song coming up in online conversation, causing me to link to (and watch) the video.

Isn’t Ivan (the lead singer) sexy in that video? So very French.

Anyhow, I watched the video, and other than drooling over sexy sexy Ivan, it got me to thinking about myself and my attitude towards life.

I think I take the whole thing too damned seriously, honestly, which might seem surprising given my tendency towards comedy. But a lot of us comedy types are extremely serious and neurotic inside, and we are drawn to comedy and internalize precisely because we need the relief from our inner demons so badly.

The two classic theater masks are at constant war within us.

We have just learned that people like the comedy half a lot more, and it’s in general a lot easier to be that half in public and only show that face to the world. Heck, sometimes we can even pretend so hard that we forget how hurt we are inside for a while.

But the other mask is always there. The comedy is a great treatment for the symptoms, but it doesn’t last, and sooner or later, the pain from your wounds (which comedy does not heal) comes back.

I am convinced that’s why so many things start out funny (like Woody Allen movies) then slowly turn more towards the serious and the tragic as they evolve and continue. The comedian starts off wanting people to like him and shows only the friendly, funny, comedy mask, but as he gets the validation he needs, he slowly reveals more and more of the other, darker, sadder side, which is the side he normally hides away from the world and which desperately needs expression and validation on its own.

You love me when I’m funny, but will you still love me when I am sad? Because that’s who I really am. A sad little boy who just wants someone to love him. The secret dream is always that if he can get you to love him for his comedy, maybe you won’t run away when you see the other side of the coin.

Who knows, maybe that even works sometimes.

Anyhow, watching the video and grokking its message of relaxation and fun and non-seriousness made me really wish I could be like that, carefree and unconcerned and living for the moment.

But then I had to ask myself : well, why can’t I? What is stopping me?

My first thought was : because I know too much. Because live is hard and dangerous and just waiting to hurt you if you let your guard down for a second.

And then I thought “My god, do I really think that?”. It doesn’t sound like me, like something I would say. It certainly doesn’t fit my image of myself as a relaxed and laid back and cool kind of guy.

But the mroe I thought about it, and peered into myself, the more I realized it was true. Deep down, that’s how I see the world. I have the kind of paranoid, anxious, guarded, and suspicious attitude typical of people who have been hurt badly and therefore never truly completely leave the “scared animal” mode of existence. We are convinced, deep down far below our self-image and our philosophies and our conscious mode, that the only way to be safe is to always been on guard and vigilant.

Fundamentally, we just plain do not trust the Universe. We feel like it’s just waiting to get us and it’s only via obsessive paranoia, trying to see in all directions at once, that we have any control. And if we just relax and be happy and carefree for even a moment, that is when it will get us.

Obviously, this doesn’t hold up logically, but it doesn’t matter, because this is all taking place at the animal level, well below our higher, more logical, more rational selves. These selves, the people we prefer to think we are instead of the wounded animals we truly are deep down, are often part of the problem, because we get so damned good at goign from one mental stimulation to another, keeping the music playing good and loud in our heads in order to drown out the cries of that scared, hurt, confused animal we do not wish to admit to ourselves we have, deep down in the dungeons of our souls.

La la la. I can’t hear you. I am too busy being funny and charming and witty and wise. I don’t have to admit you exist, even to myself, and you can’t make me.

But those who get close to you know there is something wrong.

So where does all this leave me? How do I learn to stop worrying and love the Universe?

I certainly can’t waste any more time waiting for it to love me first. I’m middle aged now (doubt I’ll live past 76, you dig?) and I have spent my entire adult life hiding from the world.

I guess for a start, I have to go find that scared wounded confused little animal, and listen to him, and try to make him feel OK.

After all, he’s me.

In other words, yet another Just Some Stuff I Thought Was Neat edition of this rambling missive.

First…from the very bleeding edge of science, we have fun uses for those metamaterial hyperlenses we all have lying around in our junk drawers, just gathering hyperdust.

The headline for that story just sounded so cool, I had to link to it. Plus, it talks about wireless power transmission, a subject I find very interesting.

But what the hell is a metamaterial?

According to the wiki article, it’s a substance engineered to have properties not found in nature. Uh, thanks, that’s like…. most of what we humans make, right? I mean, if nature had the properties we needed, we would never have invented tools, for crying out loud.

So I am calling “bullshit” and saying the real definition is “really cool materials that do amazing freaky things and hence needed the kind of name that attracts funding”.

Anyhow, the idea is that with one particularly snazzy metamaterial made of microscopically thin loops of the same copper-fibreglass blend used in printed circuits to make an extremely precise lens that could focus the energy transmissions so tightly, it might actually be safe to transmit power at higher levels than what we currently have, which is just barely enough to activate an RFID tag.

See, the problem with transmitting any serious amount of juice is that you have to be really, really, really sure that nothing else will pick up that transmission, or Serious Bad Things happen.

Imagine someone is transmitting power enough to run a television, and your amalgam fillings plus the lemon poppy seed muffin you had with your chai this morning just happens to create the ideal conditions for receiving said transmissions…. and you get a major zap just as you drive by on the busy freeway…

So as cool a thought as wireless power is, nobody has come up with a safe way to do it yet.

Also in the realm of big deal modern science, turns out that Watson, the Jeopardy winning artificial intelligence made by IBM, is doing what people with vast amounts of intellect and knowledge always do… he’s becoming a doctor!

Well, sort of. What they are going to do is take all the amazingly advanced artificial intelligence they developed to allow Watson to interpret human speech as spoken by Alex Trebek and then find the answer in its vast database of knowledge, and use it for something a little more practical than winning Jeoprady!, namely medical diagnosis.

After all, it would be a great boon to doctors to have a computerized diagnostic assistant who knows all the latest news about all diseases and treatments, and can take a plain language question containing all the known symptoms and respond with some high level analysis resulting in some likely diagnoses.

It would not replace the doctor, of course, because for one thing, it completely lacks judgment, but it could take a lot of the cognitive burden of knowing and marshaling such an enormous amount of constantly shifting information that makes the practice of medicine so difficult today.

Theoretically, if such a system was incredibly effective, it could take the job of medical practitioner from the high level professional specialty it is today to something more like a higher end technical job.

No word yet on whether or not Watson will be programmed to understand doctor’s handwriting.

Moving over to my other favorite category, Bad Things Happening To Republicans, turns out the Paul Ryan budget, despite having passed the House ages ago, is so unpopular that Republican senators are coming out of the closet and saying they will vote against it.

Finally, moderate Republicans are sensing the way the wind is blowing and deciding that if they want to actually get re-elected, they had better come out in defense of Medicare and Social Security right now.

In other words, there’s blood in the water, and the sharks are going to start seriously ripping into one another soon. Or, more charitably, the remaining moderates in the GOP have finally been handed something so odious and politically insane that they feel relatively safe in coming out against it and staking their territory as the Not Quite Totally Insane wing.

There’s just no way the party can hold when it is so clear that the inmates are running the asylum. All this Tea Party libertarian shit is pure political poison when translated into actual policy.

And we get to watch them finally die of their terminal stupidity and outright evil.

Should be fun.