Daily Archives: January 13, 2012

Today’s sampler platter

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I was going to call today’s entry something involving “potpourri”, but then I thought “Who care about potpourri? It comes in weird little sachets and invariably contains at least one thing that makes me sneeze. It’s supposed to keep your drawers smelling fresh, but I will leave that up to my fabric softener. You know what I like? Sampler platters. I love getting a whole big platter of various tasty fried things and other appies to try. I am going to call today’s entry a sampler. Take that, Evelyn and Crabtree!”

I have a long standing feud with the ladies at E&C. They know what they did.

On today’s platter, in the upper right quadrant, you will find this rather savoury bit of superbly cooked and highly piquant slab of deep fried crispy-skin schadenfreude : A whole half hour documentary about just what a heartless evil job destroying bastard Mitt Romney and his Bain Capital cronies have been in the past.

I know it’s a big helping, but you don’t have to finish it all in one sitting. Watch the first ten minutes or so, and you will get the drift. The rest is more of the same.

I officially hate that son of a bitch now. He does not simply represent the One Percent, he represents the absolute worst of them. Born to privilege, made billions completely destroying lives, businesses, and jobs, and probably doesn’t have the slightest idea why anyone would have a problem with that. After all, everything he did was legal and incredibly profitable, ergo, it was fine. And it’s not like he and his cronies ever had to even look at the people whose families they destroyed. They did it all from some posh Manhattan office.

What makes this documentary a treat, though, is that it will make for very good ammunition for Barack Obama when the right win machine, despite what their base actually wants, goes ahead and makes Mitt their candidate anyhow.

Making the case that Mitt is a horrible person will be quite easy, and while his right wing opponents might feel a little squeamish about attacking him about his Bain (should be spelled Bane) activities because they are actually on record as being for unfettered greed in capitalism, the Democrats will have no such qualms.

But enough of that challenging cuisine with the sophisticated adult taste. In the upper right quadrant of the platter, you will find everyone’s favorite Internet dish : funny cat pictures.

And for just this week, it comes with bonus GBLT content!

This is my GAY CAT STRUT BITCHES!

What is it with me and calling people bitches like that, anyhow? I seem to have a fascination with it. I have this desire to burst in a group of nerds and shout “Roll for initiative, bitches!” and see if anyone lunges for their dice bag.

I have a weird inner life, even by my own standards.

Anyhow, isn’t Pride Cat great? I am trying to figure out just what that pose suggests. I first thought “INVISIBLE DIVING BOARD” but the pose is not quite right for diving. It more suggests something highly dramatic, like opera, or figure skating. “INVISIBLE OPERA HOUSE”? Nah.

Moving to the lower left quadrant of our platter, we find another Internet staple, the tried and true taste of very silly animated GIFs. To wit :

I bet she had to think of a wonderful thing first.

Imagine the fun this gal must have had making this silly little clip. For those of you unfamiliar with camera magic, the way you make something like this is quite simple. You record yourself jumping in the air and making that flapping bird pose in four different locations on your bed, and then you edit together only those frames which have you at the right height and motion, and voila, you have what appears to be a person in her adorable pajamas flapping about her bed like she’s a chicken.

What I particularly enjoy is how the bedsheets seem to be pushed down by the force of her flight. Of course, they are really just pushed down by the force of her kerboinging on her bed, just like your parents always told you not to do. But it really sells the silly effect.

I love that kind of thing.

And now, at long last, our gaze turns to the lower right quadrant of the platter, where you will find this highly exciting and stimulating science news story en croute : turns out, every star has, on average, at least one planet orbiting it.

Is that not kewl? This means there are scads and scads more planets than was previously thought, and of course, the more planets, the more likelihood that one of them has another intelligent life form.

Or heck, just life in general. We are not in a position to be picky. Just finding some alien slime mold would be a million thrills at this point. But what we really want, of course, is another sentience.

Needless to say, Drake’s Equation has never looked so good. There might well be millions of other races out there for us to meet.

If you take a look at Drake’s Equation…..

A truly magnificent work of definitive, scientific guessing. Click to enlarge.

… you will see that what has changed is the Fp variable, the fraction of stars that have planets. When that goes up, so does N, the likelihood of there being intelligent life within radio distance of Earth.

Wow, I almost sound like I know what I am talking about, don’t I? Well, it’s just basic algebra, adding probabilities and so on. Don’t get intimidated by the subscript, it’s just there to identify each variable when there are only so many letters of the alphabet and mathematicians refuse to use two without making the second one hide below the line.

Anyhow, I am super stoked at this development. It is great news for us in the “Go Aliens Go!” group.

Of course, we really have no idea what the rest of the variables represent. What fraction of planets have life on them? What fraction of those will have intelligent life? Who knows? We can only make speculate wildly.

But still, the odds of finding more sentient life forms out there has gone up, and that’s enough for me.

Talk to us soon, Space Brothers! Preferably over the Internet, in our email inboxes.

That would seem friendly enough, right?

Another day’s dreaming

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Well, here we go on another trip through the fucked up world of my subconscious, in an attempt to figure out just what the hell is going on in there, or at least, take some pictures on this weird safari so we can show the folks back home just what a long, strange trip it’s been.

Things had been relatively peaceful in the old cerebellum lately, with a slowdown and a lowdown in the usual amount of hyper-dreaming fireworks roasting my noggin, so I suppose I should not have been surprised that I got a double whammy of it today.

But I still was. You can’t really be ready for things like this. It’s not part of the shape of it all.

The first whammy was actually pretty cool, except for the beginning point, because the first thing I remember of the dream is definitely not the first part of the dream. My memory tape definitely begins part way through the festivities, and most maddening of all, the first thing I remember from this dream set is thinking “Wow, that was completely awesome. Oh, hey, what’s this new thing?”

So I really, really wish I remembered what the heck happened before that. I am sure there actually was more before that, and that I have forgotten it. How very annoying. Oh well, moving on.

So the dream starts with me looking down into a small playing field to see a bunch of fresh faced young boys in the style of an early sixties band playing their girl pleasing somewhat Beatles-esque tunes, with the bleachers packed with teens of that era digging on all the crazy sounds, and what looks like a radio DJ and some record studio types nearby, at the other end of the field.

All of that would be cool enough, but the really trippy and wigged out thing is that it all looked like it would look if you were watching it on a black and white TV of the era. It was like the whole universe had been reformatted to that style, so everywhere I looked, things were in black and white, and slightly static-y (because this was long before cable, of course).

In fact, the first thing I remember in the dream is watching this happen, watching the black and white effect flood over my reality from the previous hyper-saturated technicolor. It was almost like a video filter being applaud to my entire universe.

And in the dream, apparently, this was no big deal. My reaction, in fact, was to say to whoever I was with “Oh, I see, they are going for a kind of early sixties television look. I wonder what this is all about. ”

And then I notice that the event we are watching is sponsored, I swear I am not making this up, by Portal 3D. And I say to my companion, “Oh, OK already, we all know Portal 3D is coming out soon, there is no need to get us all excited about it. ”

This suggest that I was basically participating in a reality-level advertisement. Chilling.

So my companion and I decide to take a seat and enjoy the show, and that’s where things get quite tricky and strange. Because somehow in this reality, my companion seems to just sort of acquire a teenager to cuddle up and enjoy the show with more or less just by wanting it.

I can’t be any clearer than that, I am afraid. I really don’t recall that part of the dream well. But I remember looking over and being jealous, and then looking to the other side of me, and thinking “what the heck, it’s worth a try. ”

So I just sort of adopt a posture like I am already cuddling side to side with someone, and in my mind I see the girl seated a little ways off on the same bench as me highlighted, like I was selecting an object in a piece of software, and then I close my arm a little to, I guess, say “OK”, and just like that, there she is, cuddled up to me with her head on my shoulder and my arm around her back. Awww!

So we cuddle, and I stroke her hair, and we watch the band, and we talk, but I do not remember a single word of the conversation. I think it was, in fact, the sensation of conversation without the content. That kind of thing can happen in dreams.

Eventually, my companion and I decide to go, and the first thing I say the moment we leave is “I want one. ”

I seem to have decided, in the dream at that point, that what I had just been cuddling was some new form of hyper sophisticated android, and I wanted one for myself because it had all been so warm and pleasant.

Also, at this point, I am getting into a car with this whoever that I am with, and I think the idea is that we are an X-Files type investigative team, and when I talk about how awesome that android was, this whoever kind of Marge Simpson growls, suggests she(?) is jealous.

And that’s the end of the first whammy. I wake up, I wander out, I watch the Daily Show and Colbert with Joe and Julian, Joe and I have a mild bit of verbal static because he’s feeling tired and ill and grumpy, and then I come back to my room and go back to sleep.

Then the second whammy hits, and it’s far less pleasant.

In it, I have had some kind of massive blowout argument with my mother and my brother. I don’t remember the argument. I am fairly sure the dream began with this big argument having already happened.

So there I am, in this very plain, Spartan motel room, crying my eyes out, super upset and freaking out about this whole big deal argument and trying to calm myself down. I am crying so hard, I can barely see, and just sort of wandering around the four small rooms of my motel room because I am too upset to sit still.

Then, just as I am about to settle down and phone them to get them to come over so I can apologize, they show up, bearing food and inviting me out to dinner.

So I sit them down at the crappy sort of kitchen table in the motel room, and I start to try and apologize, but them my brother makes some kind of sarcastic comment, and I ask him, can you please refrain from doing that for just a little while?

And he says “Oh, I don’t know, that’s going to be pretty hard.. ” and I say “It’s that hard to stop picking on me for five minutes?” and he says something about him having the right, and I lash out at him because what he is doing is really hurting me, and lo and behind, I blow up again and they leave and I am back to square one.

So now I am REALLY upset, and feel incredibly stupid and guilty for freaking out yet again, and I am once more alone in the motel room (really, more of a mini-apartment) which for some reason smells like waxed paper.

I manage to pull myself together long enough to find the phone and try to dial the number to call them up and once more try to apologize, but for some reason, it’s really hard to dial because the dial on the phone seems really far away, and I have to sort of fling my finger in what looks like the right direction and hope it hits the right number.

It’s like trying to dial a phone by throwing darts. Oh well, this is Dreamland, which supports all kinds of completely illogical interfaces.

I mean, they invented that whole never ending hallway where no matter how hard you run, you never actually get to the end. Whose crazy idea was that? Oh right, the collective unconscious.

Man, the zeitgeist doesn’t know shit about interface design. Am I right?

Anyhow, that was the end of whammy 2. I woke up from that one even more fucked up that usual from my hyper-dreams, because it had been emotionally exhausting as well as trippy.

For the record, I have never had any conversation like that with my brother and/or my mother. Nobody behaved like themselves in that dream, least of all me.

Although I feel like I now have a glimpse into what it would be like to be a far, far more emotional person, and one with anger control issues to boot.

It was all pretty upsetting, honestly. I don’t like the idea of being that out of control of myself. I value self-control highly, and being able to respond out of rational and measured choice instead of being at the mercy of whatever emotion is dominating at the moment.

I wonder if I take that too far, though.