Monthly Archives: October 2011

The Return of the Ghost of the Fooble Beast

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In keeping with the season, BOO!

Scared you, didn’t I? Feel free to send me your underwear bill. I am starting a collection.

Welcome to Castle Fooblestein, the scariest place in all of Fooblevania, on this, the day before Halloween! Arguably, for us grownups, this is the real Halloween, because most adults will be at work tomorrow and so all the parties had to be on this weekend. Tonight’s your last chance, ghoulies and ghosties and things than go hump in the night… make the most of it!

Now, admittedly, foobles, being lighthearted creatures of silliness and mirth, do not do scary very well. The coffins here are all filled with candy, not corpses, the scariest thing our secret laboratory ever produced was fake blood that is actually a very tasty cherry drink, and our torture chamber contains nothing more painful than some feathers for tickling.

So don’t be surprised if the following foobles do not exactly send a chill up and down your spine.

We tried, we really did!

Like this guy, a victim of the recent floods in Thailand. He is, at best, only a little scary.

And not a single fuck was given that day

As always, click to enlarge.

You have to admire this dude. Sure, he’s in flood water up to his nipples. Sure, he’s already taking an aggressive fashion risk already by choosing to wear a “power purple” shirt. Sure, a lesser man would actually get the fuck out of the water before feeding his nicotine habit.

But god damn it, he has a smoke in this exact spot every single day, and no petty annoyance like massive flooding is going to get in the way of his indomitable will.

I mean, is that thing even lit? I fail to see how it could be, unless he habitually keeps his cigs and his matches in his hair or something. Otherwise, you would think both smokes and fire would be way too wet.

And while I don’t smoke myself, I have known enough smokers to know that, if that cig is wet, our bold hero in solid purple is not exactly sloshing his way through Flavour Country.

But dammit, it’s the principle of the thing. If he gave up his daily smoke just because his matches were wet, his smokes were wet, and there was massive flooding, someone might thing he was less than totally cool.

And that is something that will never, ever happen!

So was that guy scary kids? Or funny? I can’t decide. Let’s ask these two audience members.

Ah, what fun we have, kitty!

Funny it is. At least, those two seem pretty amused.

But how funny? Is it just a little funny, or the sort of thing to have people jumping into the air from the sheer joy of being alive?

Man, ever since Mary Poppins stopped taking homones, she has CHANGED

Wow, that good, huh? I blush with modesty.

Seriously, though, I absolutely love that picture. There is just so much marvelous eccentricity embodied in the picture that I cannot help but adore it. It just begs you to speculate as to what de fug is going on here.

The desert setting makes me think that maybe Burning Man is somehow involved. And while it is not impossible to deliberately adopt an unnatural pose while flying through the air, his exact stance makes me think that some clever sort Photoshopped something out, like say whatever it is that is holding him up.

Regardless of origin, it is a picture that makes me happy, and I hope it makes you happy too.

As our final fooble for today, I offer you not a picture but a link.

It is a link to a site called Literally Unbelievable, and it is dedicated to those poor, innocent souls who have no idea that The Onion is a satiric, and hence entirely fictional, publication, and who consequently provide public amusement in the form of credulous commentary on that hub of all hubs, Facebook.

Here is a small example.

Can you blame her? I mean, it's so plausible!

I feel sort of bad for laughing at this people, because, after all, ignorance is only a crime if it’s willful, and we all had to learn that The Onion was fake at some point, we were not born hip.

But I laugh anyhow, because honestly, you couldn’t tell it was fake from how patently absurd it was? Talk about completely failing the irony test. The evolutionary purpose of a sense of irony and the absurd is to keep you from doing and thinking stupid things.

Yours needs work.

Well, that is it for Castle Fooblestein for this year, kids. Time to go home and empty your pillowcases, plastic jack o’ lantern buckets, and the pockets where you put the really GOOD stuff so you would not have to go looking for it later.

See you next time!

Leading an unnatural life

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It has occurred to me lately just how artificial and unnatural my life has been.

Now, I do not mean “unnatural” in any of the profoundly illogical and laughably wrongheaded ways people have abused the word in the past. The only “unnatural” form of sex is abstinence. Otherwise, every critter in the world gets its freak on and nature is not too choosy about how. Nature merely says “do that thing that feels good” and assumes that instinct will get enough of the right bits into their counterparts to propagate the species and anything else that happens is harmless biological exuberance.

Nor do I mean it in the sense that some foods are “natural” and others “artificial”. Whatever you are making something out of, it comes from nature, whether it’s the pure sweet honey from wild bees feeding from free range aloe plants lovingly and humanely transported by Andean monks, or the cheapest and most chemically unique of plastic products.

Oil is just as much the product of Mother Nature’s bounty as honey, after all. To suggest there is some sort of moral distinction between the two is to indulge in magical thinking of the most basic sort. Argue about healthy and unhealthy foods all you like, that has a basis in science and can be verified. But all that is possible is natural.

So much for the petty moralists.

No, when I say I have led an unnatural life, what I mean is that I have led a life which has been highly proscribed and compartmentalized by my desire to be logical and reasonable and sensible, to the point where all emotion is suspect and there are powerful all-encompassing blocks between emotion and action that render me essentially without motivation or even basic normal emotional functioning, and hence, I am a very ill man, emotionally speaking, and all in the name of supposedly being “smart”.

Well, smart is as smart does, and this smart doesn’t do jack shit.

It is like a ferociously micromanaged office. The office manager (my superego, I suppose) has lost all sense of proportion and is obsessed with making absolutely sure that every single thing, no matter how minor, is done in exact accordance with policy, and so doing absolutely anything requires his express permission, and he is just one overworked and overstressed guy, so there is only so many things he can approve in any given time, and so things happen very, very slowly and inefficiently.

And all in the name of efficiency, of course.

And eventually, things just grind to a halt, and the business of the office as part of a larger organization ceases entirely, and the office barely scrapes through each day doing the minimum required to keep the office itself going, and not very well.

And lots of parts of the office have not done anything ever, or not done anything in a long long time, and so the employees there are practically dead from boredom and have long since forgotten what it is they are supposed to be doing, let alone how to do it.

And all, of course, in the name of logic and reason!

What I am getting at is that this determination to always be logical and rational has had the effect of completely usurping the natural ecology of a normal person’s emotional metabolism. Certain things are supposed to simply happen naturally, flowing one to the other according to the purely internal logic of one’s unique emotional landscape, and not according to some preconceived and unnatural and unhealthy notion of how one’s emotions “should” work.

No wonder I feel so cold and dead inside. All this blocking and checking compleyely inhibits the lifeblood of my emotional life from getting to all the parts of my mind that desperately need it, and so I am downright cyanotic if not positively necrotic inside.

At the very least, I am more asleep than awake inside, and the pain I feel when I try to become motivated to do things outside my comfort zone is possibly nothing more than the pain one feels when trying to wriggle something life into your foot when it has fallen asleep.

Sadly, this bogus rationality is not something someone can simply decide to stop doing, all at once. It is a foundational axiom of my entire psyche, and you cannot simply throw those into the outer darkness without dire consequences for one’s very sanity.

But perhaps, with my therapist’s help, I can unpack, thaw, and release enough of these blockages to begin to be able to live a more natural and wholesome and happy life.

I want to be alive.

Friday Science Roundup, October 28, 2011

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Giant space lasers!

Now that I have you attention, welcome to this week’s edition of the Friday Science Roundup, that sweet spot in the week where I look over all the truly awesome science news I have accumulated over the week and pick the ones I think are looking particularly spiffy and snazzy and ready for their big debut, and parade them along the promonade for you, my lovely patrons, to see.

There might also be some really long sentences involved. No promises.

So let’s see. What goodies do we have in the big old science news Tickle Trunk today?

Well, from the great land of Japan, we have a very cool piece of new technology from the worlds of cybernetics and robotics, and for once, it’s almost not very creepy at all!

And what are these practically non nightmare inducing news toys? They are, get this, brain sensing robot cat ears which sense your mood and perk or flatten accordingly.

Specifically, they perk up attentively when you are feeling perky and attentive, they lie flat and sluggish when you feel fat and sluggish, and they move around and twitch excitedly when you are feeling excited.

So in the social sphere, what they basically do is amplify your mood signals. They go a long way towards making your mood as easy to read and interpret as your pet’s.

In this sense, they are truly the “mood rings” of the new millennium. Mood rings, but with a distinctly furry feel to them, which I find just plain adorable.

I also wonder whether these might have some therapeutic use in teaching autism spectrum disorder patients how to read moods. You start with an assistant with the ears on, and they can learn to read the ears (never thought I would be typing THAT sentence), then learn to recognize the facial expression that goes with a particular ear pattern, and thus use the ears as a birding device to make the learning curve smoother.

Here they are in action on a good looking Asian chick.

Next up, we have what has got to be the most jaw-droppingly sexy piece of technology to come out recently, the new Japanese Defense Ministry Flying Sphere Drone.

It looks like something that would be quite comfortable chasing Flynn through Tron, or Princess Leia through the Death Star for that matter, and it not only hovers quietly, but it can move in all three dimensions at up to 60 kilometers per hour and can even roll on the ground like a ball.

This thing really has to be seen to be believed.

In fact, my main problem with this thing is that it is so gobsmackingly cool that I feel I cannot possibly be objective about how useful it is. Every time I try to think about whether their claim that “because it is spherical, it can land anywhere” is true, or whether its performance will be improved when they stop using off the shelf parts, the excitable nerd in me says “But it’s so COOOOOOL!” and off I go, wanting such a cool toy for myself and wondering if it could be fitting with a tiny speaker that rmits menacing humming sounds.

I bet a lot of the journalists were thinking the same thing. Right or wrong, this is how things get funded, people. The money goes to the cool stuff.

And last and possibly least, what we have all been waiting for, giant space lasers.

Bet you thought I just did that to get your attention, huh? Oh ye of little faith.

Admittedly, though, they are giant lasers, and they are about space, but they are not actually located in space, so I might have fudged things a little.

What they are, in fact, is yet another ground-based laser system designed to take out space junk (man made stuff no longer in use) and space debris (other stuff up there in orbit).

This one has some advantages. It can zap both the big stuff and the small stuff, and being ground-based, it is, at least in theory, a lot cheaper and simpler than the space-based “junk bot” ideas that others have been putting forward as of late.

But there’s the obvious problem that what can take down space junk can take down stuff that is not space junk yet, like say the spy satellites of your political enemies.

And the less obvious problem that, at least currently, the economic value of clearing space junk is nearly impossible to assess, and hence these project defy even basic cost-benefit analysis. This makes it very hard to make the case for them even in a non-profit governmental setting.

So as cool as zapping space junk with a giant laser sounds, it is probably not going to happen.

But if it does, they should totally let regular folks try it for mucho dinero.

Properly marketed, it would pay for itself!

Flat stone in a muddy river

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As promised, back to the navel gazing rectal examination of the mind’s eye of the heart of the soul.

What can I say, I like to cover all the angles.

I feel a little better today than yesterday. Last night, I spontaneously did an experiment upon myself, where I actually slept during the night for a change.

My usual pattern has me most active between 10 pm and 6 am. It would be perfect if I was a night auditor at a motel or something. But I get the feeling my terrible sleep hygiene is a big part of my depression, and lack of energy, inability to focus, and so on. So I thought, what the hell. I will just do my best to sleep all night.

And I do feel a bit better today, so I guess it kind of worked. But not really. Because the main problem is not when I sleep, but why I sleep, and the reason is generally “to escape life for a while” and fast forward to the next interesting thing (usually a meal, and how sad is that?) while wasting my life away.

I abuse sleep. That is what it boils down to in the end. It is no wonder that it does not serve me well.

A lot of the time, I am not even sleepy. But when I do not know what to do with myself next because I am tired of using the computer and it is not time for another meal + watching something on Netflix then playing Wii yet, I lay down and take a nap anyhow. Lay down, read for a bit, go to sleep. Wake up two or three hours later, a lot closer to a meal event, and then I fuck around on the computer some more, probably playing Dungeon Fighter Online and listening to tunes off of Grooveshark, until said meal. Then eat, watch, play Wii, then back on the computer. Or maybe right into another nap. Could go either way.

I’m crazy like that.

So my life amounts to a very small well worn track between bed, computer, and television. There are maximum security prisoners and people with fatal diseases who have a more active lifestyle than me.

Sure, I go out three times with my friends. To eat. So, another meal, spending money I can’t truly afford because it gives me a minimal amount of social activity and I really enjoy being able to sit with Joe and Julian and Felicity and have our wide-ranging conversations about everything under the sun in a comfy restaurant, eating good food, relaxed and fairly content.

But it eats up most of the money I have each month to spend on myself. And that keeps me from being able to invest in better clothing, or other things I might find eased my life and gave me the sorts of small pleasures which normal people who do not live in a deep dark shadow of poverty use to help shore up their sanity.

I do not get a lot of pleasure in my life, especially physical pleasure. My life is replete with mental pleasure, in fact, arguably, that is all I do with my day. Pursue mental stimulation and mental pleasure. No wonder I have this amazingly complicated and powerful and creative brain.

I use that thing all the time, and I use it for everything!

As for emotional pleasure…. my diet is pretty sparse in that. I do not do much that gives me any sort of emotional satisfaction. There are little bits of emotional satisfaction from chatting with people online and getting a little virtual positive human interaction that way, but it is nothing like the real thing.

And there is the satisfaction when I get when I make progress in a video game. Pretty sad, that, but it is often the closest I get to productivity.

And then there is writing this ridiculous thing every day. Don’t get me wrong, I greatly appreciate everyone reading this and I cannot imagine my life without writing every day any more.

But it is not, currently, getting me anywhere, is it?

And it is not that I do not know what I could do to improve things. I know hundreds of things I could try.

But I just cannot seem to be able to bring myself to do them, and I don’t know why. I am frozen inside by a fear I cannot even name.

And so I sit, like a flat rock in a muddy river, everything surging sluggishly around me with me going nowhere at all as time erodes me down to nothing.

And one day, I will just wash away to nothing, and there will be no sign I was ever here.

Which is for the best, I guess.

What the hell, the world

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For reasons I do not clearly remember (something about it being “too easy”?), I have been avoiding writing commentary in this dusty little shelf of the web, but every now and then, I just have to sit back, relax, put on some peaceful music, and let my comment monster out of the box for some exercise.

So here we go, me taking a rare moment out of my usual rectal self-insertion and occasional brief fits of fiction and rambling philosophizing to talk about things other people are also talking about for a change.

I promise, things will go back to weird tomorrow.

But first, Occupy Wall Street.

I knew I just had to say something about this marvelous phenomenon that I feel privileged to be alive to witness and that, to me, represents the most heartwarming, wonderful, genuine, and simply miraculous thing that has yet to happen in my thirty eight years of life.

In case you haven’t figured it out yet, I support it.

In fact, support is far too mild a word. I love it, with a fervour and a vehemence bordering on the religious. I love how spontaneous it is, how honest, how completely nonviolent, how pure its idealism, how theatrical it is, and how these young people have turned what might have been a brief show of disapproval into dozens of small self-sufficient communities that feed and help and support one another, thus showing the world how this “community” thing is done.

And best of all, it means they can stay as long as they like.

And the proof that this is something that needed (and needs) to happen is how the mainstream media completely cannot handle it. They fall all over themselves trying to find some way to safely wrap it in a sound bite and dismiss it so they can go back to nice safe celebrity gossip news, and they just plain cannot. Just by staying there and not going away, the Occupy participants all over the world keep themselves in the news and thus keep their message in the democratic conversation worldwide.

I don’t know where it is all leading. But things are happening. The mainstream opinion is “I support their message, if not their tactics”, even though nobody can say what is wrong with their tactics, exactly. What is wrong with just hanging around not hurting anybody? Compared to the hippies of the Sixties, these kids are extremely organized, well-behaved, on message, responsible, clean, sincere, and sober. I cannot see anything wrong with what they are doing at all.

Maybe that is the problem. It conflicts too strongly with people’s lazy cynicism.

And most amusing of all, the Fox News and Tea Party types cannot help but be against this, as they are deeply committed to pure unadulterated evil these days and this represents all the good, wholesome, loving, Christian virtues they so violently despise. And so they have to fume and rail about leftish people doing the exact same things they praised when it was the Tea Party doing it, except without the guns and screaming and spitting on Congressmen and muttering darkly about “Second Amendment solutions”.

What they are really angry about is how effortlessly these young people have made them all look so bad. Deep down, they know they are evil villainous creatures made of bile and manure, and so the very sight of something so good and clean and pure fills them with quivering, drooling, foaming, fulminating rage.

And the best part is that there is absolutely nothing they can do about it.

So they are left to scream and rant and spew and stew in their own foul emissions and strew their own dens with their own venomous filth. The worse it gets, the angrier they get, and the more they foul their own nests, and the worse it gets.

It’s a beautiful thing.

And now Gadafi is dead. The other bastard dictators of the area must be shitting in their shoes, wondering if they will be next. And all for only about a billion dollars, and no Western lives lost.

Bet that burns them the hell up too.

Personally, I wish he had been captured alive and faced trial. Not only would that be more legal and proper, it would send a far, far better message to other tinpot totalitarians that they will not get to be rich and prosperous up until the moment their enemies kill them, but will be reduced to the status of a mere criminal, paraded in front of the world in total humiliation, then left to rot and be forgotten in some obscure prison far from their home country.

Death, they can live with, as long as they die on top.

Being reduced to less than an average citizen is far, far worse.

War Journal : Black rock in the desert

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Still not The Punisher.

Had a therapist’s appointment today, so you know what this blog entry will be all about, don’t you?

The session started out normally enough. I told him about these weird shadows I have been seeing out of the corner of my eye. It has happened about a half dozen times recently… I will see a shadow, like a small wedge of darkness so total it doesn’t even look fully three dimensional, in the periphery of my vision. It startles me when it appears but when I move my eyes to look at it, it disappears.

I told my therapist about this because I thought it might be a weird brain symptom brought on my my recent decrease in Paxil dosage from 80 mg to 60 mg. But he reassured me, somewhat offhandedly I thought, that this was not a Paxil thing, and told me to go see an ophthalmologist if it continued to be a problem.

I hope it goes away on its own, honestly, because it is hella freaky and I not need hella freaky symptoms nibbling away at my already rather frayed nerves.

I have not been feeling wonderful lately. I think I have another batch of heavy catharsis to go through or something, because I feel anxious and depressed, and like there is something in me that is trying to come out. I also feel very frustrated with myself that I have not been doing any of the things I could be doing in order to impart some kind of momentum to my life. I feel tense and irritable and I keep getting the urge to smash things, throw things, do something to vent all this simmering rage.

Seems to be part of my cycle. Things build up and build up inside, and then eventually find release and for a while, I feel better.

If only they did not have to nearly drive me crazy first.

Lately, I have thinking of it like a volcano. The pressure builds underground until it forces the lava up through the volcano’s chimney and into the air to cool and become more volcano. The pressure is thus relived for a while, and the volcano itself, and the surrounding land, subsides.

Anyhow, after the eye thing, my therapist and I got to talk about my frustrations about not doing anything with my life, and he chose a kind of confrontational tack by saying “yeah, but what are you going to do? You could come here for five years and talk and not change anything. You are good at talking. ”

That kind of thing.

This upset me because to me, it sounded like he was saying that this one thing I am clinging to as my hope for better mental health, namely going to therapy, was a big waste of time and totally pointless and that maybe (this is definitely my demons talking, not him) that he didn’t even want me as a patient.

So I got pretty mad, and made it clear to him that this is not what I wanted to hear. I told him how this therapy was my only hope and if there was no point to it, there was no point to anything, really. How I felt like I had just managed to get to the point of therapy and I did not need him rushing me past it.

This seem to take him aback. I think he knew he had fucked up, basically. My anger can be pretty overwhelming in it vehemence, and I am proud that I was able to bring it up and express it and defend myself without completely losing my shit and ending up a crying confusing wreck.

So, bravo on that score. But it bugs me that it had to happen. I guess I just have to accept that even psychiatrists make mistakes and thus, may accidentally hurt me or piss me off. It was definitely the wrong thing to say to me and he covered his ass pretty quick. I guess that is all I can hope for.

And hopefully by the time my next appointment comes around, I will have forgotten all this and forgiven him and be able to go back to relaxing into the proper therapeutic mode of openness and honesty.

But today, we hit a big black rock that came out of nowhere, and it will take time for me to get over that.

It sucks to be this sensitive sometimes. If only I was self-righteous enough not to care how difficult I am.

A visit from Hitler

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Hitler has come to visit me, and I could not be happier.

Perhaps I should explain.

It all started with this :

That, my friends, is a genuine copy of Mel Brooks doing a hilarious and remarkably well produced and listenable rap song parody of Hitler. And he is doing it as Hitler, which only makes it that much better. As a comedy guy, I can think of no better way of getting revenge on history’s monsters than by mocking them as hard as you can and robbing their legacy of even the grandeur of a mighty villain.

We laugh at your attempt to make yourself larger than life via atrocity, and show you to be the cheap petty pathetic grubby little loser you always were. You are not worth hating.

Said clip has been on my YouTube account for quite a long time without attracting much in the way of attention, like most of my clips.

But recently, I got a visit from an apparently genuine Nazi, and by my modest standards, all hell broke loose.

Check out the comments page action!

First we have a comment from a person entirely lacking in irony :

many people dont think of this man… they only see fucking videos like that and dont know anything… he was a fucking asshole, bad video 1 star

Man, talking about missing the bus entirely, huh? But big deal, that was three years ago. There was a bit of tussle with people rushing this guy’s complete ignorance, and him sadly and tragically trying to defend his point by instantly Godwin-izing himself.

“You guys are assholes, just like Hitler!”. Oh, the humanity.

But then this guy came along and really spiced things the hell up.

Calling himself ReallyImportantWork and potentially an actual Nazi (or neo-Nazi, I supposed), he kicked things off with this lovely comment :

Hitler created “6 million” new jobs which salvaged the Germans from the murderous communist jews. To supplant the economic miracle which Hitler engineered the jew-owned nations spewed the bogus “Holocaust” claims that Hitler created “6 million” jewish corpses. It was shown conclusively by the mid-1950s that no systematic extermination ever happened inside the network of camps built by the Germans. Hitler was probably the only man since the Crucifixion capable of defeating the jewish menace.

Man, i hope it hurts to be that wrong. For what it is worth, I figure this guy is sincere. Nothing in there has the telltale signs of trollish exaggeration in order to maximize offense. His points, as hilariously and pathetically easy to refute as they are, they seem like genuine neo-Nazi talking points.

Whether it is better to be a neo-Nazi than a troll is up to you.

His points, in fact, remind me of those of this guy who used to live troll my university campus. He would lurk about in his beat up ex-military jacket, trying to strike up conversations with groups of students in order to oh so subtly try to recruit them into his fucked up circle of holocaust deniers.

People would just laugh him off, not even believing he was sincere. He rapidly became a figure of public ridicule and amusement. People would whisper and point and giggles when he entered the room. Eventually, he ran out of people who did not know what he was all about before he even opened his mouth, and so he slunk back into the sad little shadows where such people go.

But meanwhile, back at the point…

Now that I have laid the foundation, I will explain why this sort of thing makes me happy.

One, it got people talking, and I love that kind of thing. My dream is to have a blog with forums and a thriving commenting community, with yours truly as both moderator and inspiration. I adore discourse, and it would make me very happy to have a community of discourse of my very own.

Also, I mean come on, this guy is hilarious. I cannot possibly be offended by comments so clearly wrong-headed and evil. I am just amazed that people like him have the nerve to comment publicly. It is like seeing some rare and absurd species of bird long thought justly extinct come crashing out of the underbrush and start trying to mate with a manhole cover.

So thanks, ReallyImportantWork, you lingering symptom of an ancient disease. I haven’t decided whether it is worth replying to you yet, but thanks for brightening up my day with your absurd antics.

Haven’t laughed this hard in ages.

Foobledy fooby foo!

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Hey there space monkeys! Welcome to another wacky and wonders waltz through the world of the weird and the wild inhabitants of the Land of the Foobs. Please try to keep your hands, legs, genitals, pseudopodia, flagellae, antennae, extrusions, and fronds inside the tour vehicle at all times, and if you absolutely must indulge in flash photography, please try not to flash anything that will upset the other passenger. Smoking is permitted only if you happen to be on fire. Passengers must remain behind the yellow line at all times, as our driver is easily spooked. No gum chewing either.

First on our safari tour, we come across a handsome and well proportioned example of a wild and untamed satirical comedy skit. This one is a British species, so be warned, it is especially venomous and toxic, and deadly accurate as well, so stay well back, and enjoy!

Brilliant stuff. I have seen other clips from these two, and they do amazing work. Sharp, funny, stingingly accurate, superbly executed, and best of all, cheap to make. It just requires the two of them and a couple of TV cameras, and, of course, a really good script. My kind of comedy.

And honestly, the whole voodoo cargo cult that passes itself off as a meaningful guide to anything known by its adherents as “economics” needs to be exposed for the shallow fraud it is as hard and as often as possible. It is rich bastards and their pet economists and other academics that got us into all this economic bullshit that we are all suffering through in the first place anyhow. The whole financial sector is based on lies, delusions, shell games, deliberate obfuscations, and outright fraud anyhow. The sooner we stop worshipping the appearance of respectability and learn to call a crook a crook, the better.

And speaking of the evil old men who rule the world so god damned poorly, you would never guess who has joined the list of those lining up in the rotunda to stick a dagger into Rupert Murdoch’s twitching corpse?

Why, none other than his archenemy, Lord Black himself.

The bad news first : Conrad Black is not going to spend any more time in jail. He and his league of evil lawyers have defeated all charges against him.

Bummer, I know. But at least he spent some time in jail, and how he is in a perfectly wonderful position to take potshots at Murdoch from the high moral ground of someone who is not only looking pure and righteous and exonerated, but someone who has been his chief rival for years and ergo knows Murdoch quite well, and who furthermore has always been the classier of the two, and thus is perfectly situated to look down his nose at Murdoch and say “Well, he was never really our kind of person anyhow, was he?” and cost Murdoch all cred and clout and sympathy from the Upper Upper types who are the only ones who could save him now.

And what hurts Murdoch hurts Fox News. Remember that. For Fox News alone, he deserves eternal pain.

And lastly, something I have had kicking around for ages now, and so I feel I should share it along with these other signs of the times type stuff.

It’s a posting to the local craigslist that made me, and my friend who is a chef in this area, very happy.

As regular readers know, I have a big soft spot in my heart for the well executed rant, that special art form where righteous anger and eloquence combine to state the truth forcefully and sometimes even hilariously.

I mean, check this shit out :

That one is quite long in the tooth (hence low video quality) but has lost none of its potency. That dude is really angry and uses it to marvelous effect.

Or how about this recent love of mine? (warning, tons of swearing)

I love the relentless energy and especially all the genuine frustration and anger and sheer ARRRGH in the singer’s voice. You can tell he really means what he says, and I can only imagine that millions of other Tube using Brits felt exactly the same way at the time.

And that brings us to the end of today’s tour through the wild and savage jungles of Foob. Please be sure to wait until the vehicle has come to a complete stop relative to the planet’s surface, and be sure to check the seats and cushions for any articles of clothing, carry-on luggage, or spawn you might have left behind.

Now get the heck out.

Another shark attack

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Yup. I am doing more music from Grooveshark. I just can’t help myself, I keep finding all this awesome music and I am compelled to share it with people.

Plus, I am just so pleased that something finally came along that made finding new music easy enough for my lazy and somewhat conservative ass to be bothered with.

Before, the stuff I downloaded tended to be stuff I already knew from my extension exposure from many years of various dabblings. That is still a pretty broad palate, including stuff my brother exposed me to, stuff that was in my parents’ record collection when I was a kid, stuff I heard off listening to the CBC, all the stuff I found when I was a volunteer at CIMN, all the stuff I caught on videotape when I was a MuchMusic junkie, and so on.

(Holy crap, CIMN is no more. Wish I had not looked it up on Wiki. And after they finally got a real broadcast license. Bummer. )

But now, I actually get to find awesome new music just with a few clicks. Stuff like this!

Song Sail
Artist AWOLNATION
Album Megalithic Symphony

I immediately fell in love with this song’s darkly orchestral mix of pretty pizzicato strings and harsh, dissonant vocals. It reminds me a little of 21st Century Schizoid Man by King Crimson, and various industrial artists like Skinny Puppy and Nine Inch Nails, in that it combines the highly mechanical sound of a distorted, filtered human voice with raw, dark, painful emotion. This creates a sound that is somehow more emotionally compelling than mere unvarnished sincerity, to my mind. Sadly, the rest of AWOLNATION’s work is not quite so dark, although there’s still good tracks, so give them a listen if you like this kind of thing.

Song Size Matters
Artist Natasha Bedingfield
Album Unwritten

I just plain could not love this song more. I had no idea what I was in for when I clicked a song called Size Matters, but I certainly didn’t expect a fun, funny, sensitive song about being big of heart and great of spirit. I endorse the song’s message wholeheartedly. I am a big believer in spiritual growth and choosing the bigger hearted option. It is not only the right thing to do, it also makes you happier in the long run because problems which seemed huge before now seem trivial and easily overcome. Just as if you had physically grown from the size of an ant to the size of an elephant. And, on a personal note, I must really love the song in order to forgive it for saying “big up the love” so many times. I mean ouch!

Song Tightrope
Artist Janelle Monae
Album The ArchAndroid

Funky does not begin to describe this song. Muscially speaking, it’s like a phenomenal amalgam of hiphop, jazz, Latin music, and pure uncut hardcore awesome. It is the kind of song that makes even a fat ol slug like me want to get up and dance. And it makes me happy, because while I love the electronic sounds of yesterday and today, I am highly pleased that people have finally realized that you can also use your computer to make something that sounds more or less just like any other genre of music you like, or even to make something that synthesizes elements of previous styles into something greater than the sum of its parts. The work of Gnarls Barkley (now sadly defunct) is a great example of this. It’s soul music, and yet, also something more. Do they have a name for this yet?

Song The Journey
Artist Fatboy Slim
Album Palookaville

I am addicted to this song. I love its walking, swaying beat and sort of Western movie influenced sound. You can just imagine the singer walking along to the beat of the song on his journey. How appropriate! And the lyrics speak to the side of me that longs to just wander away and never come back. The part of me that doesn’t want to come home when I have out and walking for a while. The side that gets wistful in airports, wishing I was going somewhere. It is the complete opposite of my socially anxious side that wants to stay home forever and not deal with the world at all. That side is in control of me, and has been for most of my life. But there is still a part of me that just wants to wander the world and see what happens to me.

Well, I guess that’s it. Can’t think of another song to add, though I have this vague feeling that I am missing something I usual do now. Hmmm. Like I missed something.

Oh right! An Eminem song!

Song 25 To Life
Artist Eminem
Album Recovery

SPOILER ALERT. Please listen to the song before reading the rest of this article.

This song really blew my mind not just because it is another fine example of how Eminem is a master of expressing life and pain in rhyme, but because it also fooled me right until the end. The whole song sounds like he is talking about a woman, presumably Kim, his ex-wife, and then at the very end, he reveals he is talking about the rap industry itself. Did not see that coming. Then, of course, when I listened to the song again, I had a whole new appreciation for it. That is some literary shit, Marshall. I am impressed. Say, is there a word for his kind of rap? None of that gangsta bullshit, just the truth of life expressed in all its pain and messiness and reality? Because if so, I would like to know it, so I could find more of it. It might actually get me into rap enough to consider myself a rap fan, as opposed to a nonfan with just a few rappers he likes, like Eminem, MC Frontalot, and MC 900 Foot Jesus. (All white guys… hmmm… )

OK, that’s it for realz. Seeya later folks!

Friday Science Roundup, October 21, 2011

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Hi there all you wonderful people! You are all looking especially dominant and sexually desirable this week. Have you been participating in activities intended to move you towards your ideal mass? No? I lightheartedly question the veracity of that statement in order to exaggerate the sincerity of my previous observation!

Got some really interesting stuff to share this week, unlike other weeks, in which, frankly, just between you and I, I was really phoning it in.

Please at least pretend you are surprised and shocked by this revelation. My ego responds to compliments just like yours does, only more so.

First off… well, I guess I better get this over with right away. No sense in beating around the bush, even though honestly I am ashamed to even bring it up, because it might seem like I am bragging or putting myself forward, and if that was the impression I gave, well, I would just blush so hard… but here goes anyhow.

Turns out, according to a recent study, people consider easily embarrassed people more trustworthy.

The funky folks at University of California Berkeley proved this, and to me, it makes perfect sense. Someone who is easily embarrassed is someone who demonstrates a capacity to feel shame, and we naturally consider such a person to be trustworthy because we figure, deep in our animal brains, that said shame will keep them from doing bad things. This goes more than double for someone who blushes. That goes right to our primate minds, from back when our emotions were expressed more by blushing and flushing than by facial expression.

The cynical part of my mind wonders if this means that being able to fake being embarrassed easily or even blush on cue would be a golden treasure for professional liars like con men, actors, or bankers.

Turning to the world of medicine, we have the mildly surprising news that apparently, pig to human tissue transfers are “imminent”.

Well, to be more specific, human trials might well be imminent. And by imminent, we mean they could start as soon as only two to three years from now!

Not exactly piping hot news right off the transom. Stupid sensationalistic science journalism. But still, pretty interesting nevertheless.

I confess, I have not thought about animal to human tissue transplants in at least a decade, probably two. I mean, how long has it been since that baboon to human heart transplant? 27 years? It really feels like news from the past.

And to be honest, I have been paying so much attention to things like tissue engineering and stem cell research that seem like they are the wave of the future that thinking about animal tissue transplants seems positively bizarre.

But our love of pork produces an awful lot of dead pig parts that right now just get thrown away. If we could turn waste into human life, that would be a truly amazing piece of modern medical alchemy.

Obviously, though, Muslims and Jews are not going to go for it. What could be more traif than having a piece of pig inside you forever?

Finally, from one of my favorite scientific frontiers, namely brain science, rejoice, cynics and pessimists : optimism is a brain defect.

Or at least, that is one interpretation of the data from a recent fMRI study by a team of English and German scientists. The story is sadly poor on the exact details, instead choosing to waste column inches on explaining why excessive optimism might be a bad thing.

Well duh. Excessive anything is, by definition, bad. And we all know how irrational exuberance lead to the 2008 financial meltdown.

Well, that, and evil old white men stealing from everybody.

And being a depressive, I can tell you all about how the opposite can be just as bad if not even worse. Excessive pessimism leads to depression, lack of motivation, inability to make decisions, passing up genuinely good opportunities, isolation, social incapacity, and in general, a human being who is not functional at all.

From my admittedly biased point of view, it is obvious that a certain degree of irrational optimism is actually beneficial, as it provides a buffer that makes it tougher for life to get you down and keeps you filled with hope for better so you can keep going until it actually does get better.

Sounds a lot better than crippling depression to me. Maybe you take foolish risks, but you take smart ones too.

Maybe it all evens out somehow.