Once more, I have no particular plans for today’s entry, so I am winging it.

Luckily, being someone who is way better at coming up with plans than at actually implementing them, I have a certain amount of experience with winging it.

I have highly developed wing muscles.

Luckily, I still have the random stuff that ends up washing ashore in my browser to work with, so I will just share said things with you.

For instance, I came across this recently, and it made me so very happy.

It is a half hour of Genesis in their prime, with Peter Gabriel looking all sexy and intense and the rest of them all looking like the dirty shaggy hairy hippies they were back then. There they are, making awesome 1972 Prague rock prog rock happen, and showing that for them, half an hour can be basically a single song.

I cannot emphasize enough how hot Peter Gabriel looks back then, despite his tendency to overdo the gesticulation maybe just a little. Well, they were barely out of college, and part of prog rock’s “thing” was that it was done by highly educated bookish types who were not natural entertainers and who often therefore did not exactly rock the house with their stage presence.

In fact, part of Pink Floyd’s standard lore is that they had such incredibly expensive and daring and eye popping visual concerts, with giant parade balloons and huge special effects, in their heyday because they knew they were basically three very dull upper class British fellows who just played their instruments and sang without doing much. And so they had to make the rest of the show so interesting that nobody would pay attention to the three boring British dudes on the stage.

The fact that a lot of their audience was on, shall we say, performance enhancing drugs (leading to drug enhancing performances) did not hurt either.

Genesis, in the clip above, had obviously not quite reached that stages yet. and so it is just four British hippies getting their progressive rock thing on.

Bonus knowledge for me : I had often wondered who played the flute in their early stuff. Turns out it was Peter. Now I know.

I could go on about Genesis for the entire thousand words, easily, but I suspect none of the rest of my readers care about them, so I will move on.

Next, there is this little bit of fun :

Did you see the twist coming?

Isn’t that always the way it goes, fellas? You go after what seems like the perfect girl and she turns out to be a bitch?

Seriously, though, cute trick, Atlanta Humane Society. I am sure that amongst those fifteen thousand men, you got at least one decent adoption prospect. Not sure it was worth the 14,999 pissed off, angry, embarrassed calls from guys looking to bang a hot black chick (of the human kind), but still, cute.

I particularly like the cleverness of the phrasing. Everything in the ad is no doubt perfectly true of Daisy, the black bitch in question. Dogs love to play, especially the sporting breeds like black Labs. Dogs certainly do not care about your ethnicity, and they love to go hunting, fishing, and camping with you. Basically, they like doing things with you, especially in a stimulating outdoor environment where they can romp and play and smell everything.

And unless you are one of those weird people who puts clothes on your dog (totally unnecessary for a black Labrador, they are retrievers, they are naturally waterproof), then she will certainly happy to greet you at the door naked.

I hope Daisy went to a good home, with someone who would take care of her and love her and play with her. We already know he must have had a good sense of humour.

Finally, there is this pretty damned interesting article on near death experiences on Salon.com that I am slowly making my way through.

That is how it tends to go with me. When something is really interesting, it takes me a long time to read it, because I keep needing to stop reading to really thinking about what I just read.

I already knew the basics about near death and out of body experiences from having read about the subject before in my readings on various paranormal and fringe science type phenomena. But there is a lot about this I did not know, like this :

However different their personalities before the NDE, experiencers tend to share a similar psychological profile after the NDE. Indeed, their beliefs, values, behaviors, and worldviews seem quite comparable afterward. Importantly, these psychological and behavioral changes are not the kind of changes one would expect if this experience were a hallucination. And, as noted NDE researcher Pim van Lommel and his colleagues have demonstrated, these changes become more apparent with the passage of time.

Now that is an interesting result. Anything that can take the wide variety of human personality and move it towards unity bears a second look. I have tended to somewhat pooh-pooh the notion that a great deal of what we do as human beings stems from the fear of our own death, but this would seem to lend credence to that idea. Once people have this personal experience of an afterlife, they are completely convinced that there is life after death, and they become much happier people.

They laugh a lot, they get pleasure from the little details of life, their new positive personality lets them make friends with everyone they meet… it is, by all rational measurement, a vast improvement. They become like wise holy men, happy and relaxed and perfectly at peace with themselves.

And all because they had a brush with death and came back.

You know what that means, don’t you?

Flatliners lied to us, man!

Still, one wonders if you could found a religion based on (safely) giving people near death experiences.