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Complex Numbers A complex number is expressed in the standard form a + bi, where a and b are real numbers and i is defined by i^2 = -1 (that is, i is the square root of -1). For example, 3 + 2i is a complex number. The bi term is often referred to as an imaginary number (though this may be misleading, as it is no more "imaginary" than the symbolic abstractions we know as the "real" numbers). Thus, every complex number has a real part, a, and an imaginary part, bi. Complex numbers are often represented on a graph known as the "complex plane," where the horizontal axis represents the infinity of real numbers, and the vertical axis represents the infinity of imaginary numbers. Thus, each complex number has a unique representation on the complex plane: some closer to real; others, more imaginary. If a = b, the number is equal parts real and imaginary. Very simple transformations applied to numbers in the complex plane can lead to fractal structures of enormous intricacy and astonishing beauty. ![Merit Badge in Quill Award
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| There are no breweries near my randomly-selected location in central Minnesota, but that doesn't mean I couldn't try a new-to-me beer. I think many people, if they found themselves in a small rural town on the prairie, with very limited dining options - chain restaurants and small local places - would end up questioning the life choices they made that led them to a tiny, hole-in-the-wall dive bar. Me? I call it a return to my roots. For a dive bar, they had a pretty good draft beer selection, including some from various craft breweries. Later today, I'll head for Minneapolis, which has more breweries than I'll have time to visit. But that won't stop me from trying. |
Entry #8 of 8 for "Journalistic Intentions"  [18+]. I figured I'd better get in this final entry while I have time. Doorways I Haven't OpenedThere are several oft-repeated proverbs that irk the hell out of me. For example: "There is nothing new under the sun." I don't care that it comes from the Bible; it's not only too cynical even for me, but demonstrably untrue. Oh, sure, it might have been true 2-3000 years ago when things were relatively stagnant, but... well... I've been traveling on back roads in a car, following directions from Google Maps on my Android, and staying in basic but comfortable hotel rooms. None of these things existed 200 years ago, and hell, Maps and smartphones weren't around 20 years ago. They are new, and really, "under the sun" may be poetic, but it doesn't exactly mean much (at night, are we "over" the sun?) Of course, one could argue that it's a restatement of matter-energy equivalence, of how neither can be created nor destroyed, only transformed. I don't give the writers of Ecclesiastes that much credit, though. And new stuff happens all the time, both good and bad. Atomic bombs, airplanes, robots, comedy routines, Coke, electricity transmission, trips to the Moon, and so on. Another proverb I can't stand is: "That which does not kill you makes you stronger." Pretty sure that one comes from Neitzche, lest you think I'm only ragging on Bible quotes here. Also demonstrably untrue, and it irks the living hell out of me; I've spoken before of my WW2 veteran uncle, who survived the war only to suffer PTSD for nearly half a century afterward, until his death. Anyone who thinks he's stronger for that gets my deepest scorn. Neitzche was probably referring to his epic mustache. Pretty sure it had a life of its own, and he had to be stronger just to support the weight of it. But of all the stupid duck-billed platitudes bandied around, one of those that I most utterly despise is: "When one door closes, another opens." I mean, what even? Better hope you're not on an airplane when that happens. This one is attributed to inventor Alexander Graham Bell, who might be forgiven for it because he lived before airplanes were invented. In any case, I don't care who made it up; this is nothing more than wishful thinking. I mean, other than the airplane thing, consider: prison cells and hotel rooms. I hope when I close the hotel room door that another one doesn't open. But even if you insist on keeping it metaphorical, death can be considered the closing of a door, and that's pretty final. Unless of course you indulge in wishful thinking. No, sometimes another door does not open, nor does a window; and moreover, sometimes you don't really want it to. Still, that's probably tangential to the prompt, but far be it from me to take things too literally, right? I have a strong urge to go to forbidden places. Not, like, Chernobyl or anything like that (though that might be cool), but, like, penthouses, steeples, the tops of suspension bridges, the torch of the Statue of Liberty, the inside of Elizabeth Tower in London -- that sort of thing. Yes, mostly high places. I have no fear of heights; in fact, I love the views. But it would only be made more awesome if it's a place not generally open to the public. I have heard that Elizabeth Tower, at least, can be visited -- if you're a UK subject. From what I understand, you just have to arrange it with your MP. I've seen pictures of the inside, including the world-famous Big Ben (just to be clear, Big Ben is the bell; the tower itself was only named in 2012). Point is, though, Americans are shit out of luck there. And the S of L torch has been closed off for, I don't know, I can't be arsed to look it up, but something like a century. And most of those other places are just plain inaccessible. Daredevils have done some of them, mostly getting caught and punished for their crime of wanting to go someplace They don't want you to go. These attractive, forbidden places are all behind locked doors. Doorways I haven't opened, and probably never will. Trip update: Decorah, Iowa. Remember yesterday how I was talking about places that are named for things that no longer exist? Decorah, it turns out, was named after a Native American leader. You can guess what happened to their tribe. Hint: they aren't in Decorah. |
| Another ambiguous reference. I could put the state in the title, but what would be the fun in that? Anyway, I mean the one in Illinois, not the one in Indiana. Hey, at least it's not Springfield. Then it could be any state. Sometimes I think it would be fun to visit every Springfield in the country, mostly to see how many of them were actually named after spring fields and, if so, how many of those have been paved over (my guess: all). But I'd get really tired really fast of all the Simpsons jokes. Lots of places are like that, you know. You name a place, I dunno, "Oakville," because there's a shit-ton of oaks there, and then you cut down all the oak trees. Then people come to the town, look around, and are like "Why is this called Oakville." "Well, because of the stand of oak trees" "What stand of oak trees?" "Oh, we cut those down years ago." Or you call a city "Peaksville." "Is it named after some guy named Peak?" "No, it's after the mountain." "What mountain?" "The one we leveled to build the city." Point is, it's extraordinarily rare that whatever they've named the place after is still there today. This is trivial in the case of, say, New York, named after a long-dead Duke of York, but, like... hell, I don't know... the town of Woodbridge, Virginia doesn't have a wooden bridge anymore. Or maybe it does, but not the one it was named after. Bloomington is kind of like that. According to this, anyway, it was named after a grove (of unspecified type) called Blooming Grove (so, presumably, some variety of angiosperm). Whether the grove is still there or not is unclear, but I'd put money on "not."Not that it's a big city or anything. It's actually quite nice, from what I've seen, and you might have noticed that I met Sum1  for dinner and beer at a truly excellent local brewpub. Here's the note he posted, including a very rare pic of Me (I'm the cute one in the picture): "Note: I had a wonderful dinner tonight. A certain some..."So yeah, I know that this is mostly just rambling. It's too early in the morning for much of anything else. Which reminds me -- time to hit the road. |
| As a reminder, I'm traveling and thus my blog entries may be delayed or skipped. Yesterday, I drove to Athens. No, not the one in Greece, obviously, or the one in Georgia (the state), but the one in Ohio. I've been here before, but that time I stayed at the edge of town and didn't really see much of it. Today I drove and walked around a good bit of Athans. I thought I lived in a quirky college town. Well, okay, I do live in a quirky college town (look, that unpleasantness a couple of years ago was caused by tourists trucked in from out of state), but Athens makes Charlottesville seem normal. Don't ask me to explain that, though. Yes, I know; I'm a writer and so I should be able to put it into words. But there are three breweries and one brewpub in Athens, and consequently, I'm hung over. So don't expect any kind of eloquence from me today. Perhaps another time, if I remember any of the details. For my first trip out of state in two years, it wasn't bad. I expected everyone in West Virginia to pretend like there isn't, and never was, a pandemic, and behold, everyone I saw in West Virginia acted like there isn't and never was a pandemic. Pretty state, but goddamn it's infested with idiots. I mean, obviously there are idiots everywhere, but most states don't make it a condition for residence. I even saw a bunch of Confederate flags there, thus proving that no one bothers to learn history anymore either. I should also note that the mountain ranges in WV generally run southwest to northeast (or vice-versa). Hence there aren't too many routes one can take driving northwest. Even interstates zigzag around that state, and like I said, I'm avoiding those. So it was one winding mountain road after another for me today. I like it that way. Like I said, nice scenery there. Note: if you feel compelled to sneer at what we in the East call mountains, feel free to refrain. Yes, I know what we call "mountains" are barely even speed bumps. They're still a pain to drive across. |
| More from Cracked. I promise I have more non-Cracked links than Cracked links, but such are the perils of random number generation. As you know, I'm a sucker for linguistics articles, whether they come from comedy sites or otherwise. The English language was invented by a collection of hairy men with poorly healed axe wounds to the head, then refined by a bunch of guys in bad wigs who drank a pint of mercury every morning to treat their syphilis. It was spelled entirely at random until the late 1500s, when the earliest attempts at standardized spelling were made, largely out of spite. A fair summary, even if it leaves out the influences of French and alcohol. Since then, English has grown to become the second most widely spoken language in the world, but some of the most famous names in history have found themselves inexplicably unhappy with the language's rigorous development process and have proposed reforming English spelling. Are you kidding? If we ever reformed English spelling, it would be that much harder to tell educated people apart from idiots. 4. Ben Franklin Tried To Get Rid Of The Letter 'C' Ben Franklin was probably the coolest founding father, spending approximately half his time humiliating his enemies and the other half plowing his way across Europe. But every jock has a boring side and Franklin was a passionate advocate of spelling form. Specifically, Franklin wanted to introduce a more phonetic alphabet, where letters correspond directly to spoken sounds. In modern English, letters can be pronounced wildly differently depending on context. For example, in "Pacific Ocean" the first C is pronounced like you're sexually harassing a snake, the second C should sound like you're choking on an aspirin, and the third C is pronounced like a slowly deflating air mattress around 3 AM. Mostly I'm just leaving this here because it's funny. To replace the lost letters, Franklin proposed six new ones to represent sounds like the "-ng" in "running" and "jumping," or the "sh" in "action." Apparently no one told him that one of the languages related to English already had an 'ng' letter. Unlike the 'th' letter, though, I can't find it in the ASCII symbol list. But here it is. In any case, I find it hilarious that the guy who wanted to eliminate the letter C ended up on the C-note. 3. Noah Webster Wanted To Change How We Reed And Rite Webster was a huge advocate of spelling reform and is best remembered today for his war on U, which he considered an unseemly letter that had no business sneaking up on a gentleman in the middle of a perfectly reasonable word like "color" or "rumor." The English had tried to class up their language by adopting pseudo-French spellings for many words. Thanks to Webster, American spelling rejected this, replacing forms like "centre" and "plough" with the simpler "center" and "plow." So, you know, just in case you were wondering why we spell some words differently, blame Webster. 2. Teddy Roosevelt Ordered The Entire Government To Use "Simplified Spelling" By the late 19th century, spelling reform had become a trendy issue in high society. Even Mormon leader Brigham Young was touting his own phonetic "Deseret Alphabet," which was generally incomprehensible to even devout Mormons, but got slapped on every street sign in Utah anyway. If my name were Brigham, I'd want to change spelling also. In fact, all words ending -ed were supposed to end with -t instead, turning "snapped" into "snapt" and "passed" into "past." Needless to say, traditionalists were pist. Snort. The British papers quipped "Karnegi and President Rusvelt are doing ther best to ad to the gaiety of nations (or nashuns)," while an American journalist declared that "Nuthing escapes Mr. Rucevelt. No subject is tu hi fr him to takl, nor tu lo for him tu notis. He makes tretis without the consent of the Senit. He inforces such laws as meet his approval, and fales to se those that do not soot him. He now assales the English langgwidg." Pretty sure I've gotten similar texts. 1. George Bernard Shaw And The Shavian Alphabet For example, Shaw declared that apostrophes were useless and removed them from contractions like don't and musn't in his writing. But he was forced to keep using an apostrophe in I'll to avoid confusion with ill. So now there was an apostrophe in some contractions but not in others. It was an apostrophe catastrophe! Fun Fact: "apostrophe" and "catastrophe" are spelled exactly the same way in French with the same meanings - but are pronounced like APP-uh-strof and CAT-uh-strof. In any case, it's worth reading the whole article. Usual disclaimer: Cracked doesn't exactly put a lot of time into fact-checking, so don't assume it's absolutely factual, especially the funny bits. I've often wondered exactly how it is that, with all of its borrowings, inconsistencies, and ambiguities, English became the default international language. I mean, yes, sure, British colonialism, but that can't be the whole story. It's almost as if the entire world said, "Hey, here's a language that's really, really hard to learn, one that even native speakers often get wrong, and which has counterintuitive spelling / sound combinations like through, though, and tough. Let's make sure to use it to communicate with other people!" Almost every spelling/pronunciation mismatch in English has a reason. This word came from proto-German; that one came from Latin by way of French; this other one was originally Hebrew, which uses an entirely different alphabet. But here's the thing: when using a language that is both spoken and written, it's incredibly annoying to have to learn different pronunciation rules for the same letter combination, as with the examples in the previous paragraph. You almost have to learn each word individually. I remember as a kid learning to read, they'd always tell me when I hit an unfamiliar word: "Sound it out." But then I'd sound it out and it'd be like "No, no, that 'gh' sounds like 'f'. And 'cough' doesn't sound like 'tough.'" Gah! This was before Hukt On Fonix, which I know nothing about except that it exists. But there is one thing about the vagaries of English: it's an opportunity to display one's superiority. I know how to spell, punctuate, apostrophize, and (usually) pronounce English. Not that I never make mistakes, of course, but I take great pleasure in demonstrating my grasp of English words and sentence structure. Elitist? Yes, absolutely. I can live with that. Still, the egalitarian in me still thinks language reform would be a good thing. But at this point there's no way to impose it from above; it'll have to grow organically, the way most language evolves over time. And hypocritically, when it does, I sneer at the new spellings, abbreviations, and words because whoever came up with them is clearly an idiot. |
| Entry #7 of 8 for "Journalistic Intentions" [18+] You know, something that's been percolating in the back of my mind for a while has to do with the tension between "being normal" and "standing out." This generally peaks in high school and diminishes thereafter, but these days, I think it continues long into adulthood. Clothing, hairstyles, activities... doesn't matter; lots of people walk the line between being too ordinary (and thus overlooked) and too weird (and thus dismissed as eccentric). This is bad enough when you're actually in high school. There, you're among, at most, a couple of thousand teenagers (which, when put like that, makes me wonder how anyone has the stamina to be a teacher or school administrator). Like, my high school had around 1600 students, as I recall, roughly 400 in each class. With numbers like that it's not too hard to find ways to be noticed while still being accepted in a peer group. Then maybe you get to college or trade school, and the numbers get larger, so you have to do more to excel at something. Fortunately, by then, the burning desire to "fit in" generally starts to recede. Still, there, depending on the school, you're competing for attention with several thousand other students. But that was the old days. Now, you have to walk that line not just for your immediate circles, but in competition with several billion people infesting the internet. Some people can do it through talent, looks, or smarts. For the rest of us, though, we're left with Stupid Human Tricks. Or, for those who realize that Stupid Human Tricks can be dangerous, we have to find other ways to differentiate ourselves from the vast unwashed masses. For them, there's Munchausen's. Now, I don't mean that to imply that people who talk about their various physical and/or psychological troubles are faking it. But even if it's real, it's a way to garner attention and sympathy, and to stand out from the crowd. I'm not going to mention any examples here, because I'm not trying to offend anyone. But I will offer a counterexample: Chadwick Bosemen, who kept his cancer diagnosis to himself (and, presumably, some close friends sworn to secrecy). Of course, he had no need to seek out sympathy for attention; he was a talented actor. Those of us who don't get to be major movie stars, though, we have to take our attention where we can get it -- positive or negative. And I don't want anyone thinking I'm ragging on them for this. It's just human nature, and I've talked about some of my own issues in here, too. Of course, we have to watch out for those few who do fake it to get sympathy. This usually takes three forms: Munchausen's Syndrome: Faking (or exaggerating) illness for attention Munchausen's-by-proxy: Faking illness in another person (often a child) for attention Munchausen's-behind-proxies: Faking illness (in yourself or others) online for attention (and sometimes GoFundMe). Okay, yes, I totally made that last one up. But I've seen it happen. Of all of the possible ways to beg for attention, though (getting back to the original prompt quote there), insomnia is pretty tame compared to other things you can bitch about suffering. Most people have had it at least occasionally (myself included), so it's easy to sympathize. No one is going to think you're trying to scam them out of money by faking insomnia, not like with cancer or whatever. And it's not going to scare the unenlightened, like say talking about your schizophrenia. Bottom line is, yes, it's hard to stand out in a crowded world. And maybe I should just give up trying. Perhaps I'll sleep on it. Because I can. Because I don't have insomnia? Get it? Oh, never mind. Even my so-called jokes don't make me "not normal." |
| One of the reasons I like to travel -- I'm still planning on leaving on Saturday -- is to eat at restaurants I haven't been to. Don't get me wrong, though; I'm not one of those food adventurers. I'll leave the bug-chomping, weed-chewing, and snail-juice-drinking to much bigger attention whores. Why try anything exotic when, for example, I still haven't found the Perfect Cheeseburger? (I did find the Perfect Pizza once, but that's not going to stop me from trying other places.) But every common food was new once. I'm pretty sure I posted in here before about tomatoes -- how Europeans, once those red round bastards made it across the ocean, at first thought they were poisonous. Now you can't spit in Europe without hitting a tomato-based dish. And who in the hell first looked at a cow and went, "I'm just going to squeeze these dangly things here and drink whatever comes out?" Point is, today's staple is yesterday's adventure food, so I can't rag too much on the brave explorers of culinary experimentation. It's just not for me. So today's article, from Cracked (and as usual, selected at random), is about foods that are new. Ish. Have you ever completely changed your opinion on a food? Maybe you had PB&Js all the time as a kid, then one day, decided it wasn't for you. Nope. Still like 'em. Though I can never be arsed to have all the ingredients for them, and they're not exactly a staple at restaurants. Maybe you hated canned tuna, but then one day ordered ahi nigiri to seem sophisticated on a date and now you own a tuna fishing boat. Nope. Still like tuna. Yes, I heard about Subway. All I'll say on that is: absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Maybe you thought New York pizza was the pinnacle of the universe, and then you spent a weekend in Chicago. You shut your whore mouth. 6. You're Not Turning Into Your Parents, Brussels Sprouts Actually Do Taste Better Now You know how a big gag in the '80s and '90s was about how terrible Brussels sprouts were? Um... no? I mean, yes, I hated them as a kid because my mother cooked them and, while she tried, she couldn't cook vegetables to save her life. Which sucked because we had an enormous vegetable garden. One day, I'm checking out a big bag of Brussels sprouts at the grocery store, because once I learned how they were supposed to be cooked (that is, not boiled for an hour and kept unseasoned), I started liking them. Cashier: Can I ask you a question? Me: Sure. Cashier: How can you eat those things? Apparently, she never got the memo. Anyway... Hans Van Doorn, a scientist with a name so Dutch we don't have to tell you where he's from, isolated all the compounds that make Brussels sprouts so bitter. Then, a handful of Brussels sprouts companies (apparently there are whole companies devoted to this stuff) started looking at records of old varieties with lower amounts of these compounds. One breeder at the Bejo Zaden company said they had "a whole gene bank here in our cellars." How it's possible to trust a comic-book villain is still unresolved. Apparently that gene bank is organized into "this sucked" and "this didn't suck," and the breeders got their Gregor Mendel on and started experimenting with various groups, cross-pollinating and cross-pollinating over and over until people didn't hate Brussels sprouts quite as much. Science! Also, it should be noted that Brussels sprouts and the next entry, kale, are actually the same plant. Along with cabbage, turnips, and a whole list of other things your mom made you eat before you could have dessert. (This is somewhat similar to how chihuahuas and great danes are both dogs.) 5. Kale Went From Decoration To Ubiquitous Fad Kale: just typing the word probably made you reflexively click over to a Pinterest board. Nope. We grew kale, too. Even managed to sell some at farmer's markets. This was back in the 70s. We'd have charged more if we knew it was going to become a joke. Pizza Hut relegated kale to ... salad bar decoration. No, Pizza Hut didn't even have some secret soul food era where they slow-cooked greens with smoked ham hocks. They just bought bunches and bunches of kale because it looked healthy on the salad bar. It is an invariable truth that anything that "looks healthy" is going to taste like warm ass. Kale is no exception. Speaking of trendy foods... 4. Avocado Became Popular So Fast Cartels Got Involved No, we didn't grow avocados. Wrong climate. But when we got them at the store, I hated them because my mom's idea of a ripe avocado was one that was mostly black inside. In her defense, there's an approximately fifteen-second window between "underripe" and "rotten," and it's really hard to hit that window just from looking at their wrinkly outsides. If you're an American over the age of 30, you probably remember a time when avocados weren't absolutely everywhere (if you're an American under 30, please keep reading, but don't tell me). No, not really. Like I said, I remember avocados from way back. I even like them. I simply don't worship them. I can take or leave guacamole, but sometimes they're a nice accompaniment to beef. That's because avocados mostly grow in Mexico -- tropical fruit doesn't exactly thrive in, say, Indiana. To be fair, nothing thrives in Indiana, but avocados have an especially hard time. Actually, I just quoted the above bit to reinforce that it's true that nothing thrives in Indiana. 3. It Took Less Than One Generation To Completely Change How Babies Eat On the list I made long ago, "Pros and Cons of Becoming a Father," there was, among dozens of other entries, a triple-underlined phrase on the "Con" side: "Baby food is gross." I don't remember the one or two things that were on the Pro side. But purees are slowly becoming as popular as pregnant women having three martini lunches. In its place is something called Baby-Led Weaning, which is when parents set pieces of solid food in front of their baby and let them pick around and explore tastes. You mean "throw some of the food against the wall, scatter most of the rest on the table, and discover the immutability of gravity by dumping what's left on the floor." Also, recycling those endless Gerber jars sounds like a nightmare. My dad had endless empty Gerber jars in the basement. They were excellent for storing screws. He used them right up until I had to move him due to Alzheimer's, when I was in my 30s. 2. The Plant-Based Burger Craze Is Kind Of Miraculous It wasn't so long ago that vegetarian burgers were "black beans pressed into a patty" or "a weird mush of a bunch of veggies, with corn conspicuously sticking out." I like meat. As I noted above, I'm on a quest to find the Perfect Cheeseburger. But I've also been known to enjoy plant-based substitutes for meat, earning me the scorn of some fellow carnivores. I don't care; I like what i like. Traditional veggie burgers are good, in my opinion, not because they taste like burgers (they totally don't) but because they're their own thing. Veggie "sausages" are actually quite good. And vegetarian "bacon," while it doesn't taste even the slightest bit like actual bacon, isn't bad; I just don't try to pretend it is bacon. Vegetarian "chicken nuggets," on the other hand, taste like cardboard. Anyway, the point is, I'm not above trying vegetarian food (though I will generally shun anything labeled "vegan" on principle). I haven't had occasion to attempt these newer, supposedly burger-tasting burgers, but I will. I just want to try the one that doesn't contain beet juice. Beets taste like cardboard soaked in a mud puddle. Some point to these companies' strategy of trying to appeal to carnivores as the key to their success. This makes sense -- being told you're getting chicken tenders when all you're really getting is pressed tofu sucks -- but you can't always rely on red-blooded American burger-chompers to completely change their habits because you did a science. If the response to the COVID-19 pandemic says anything, it's that Americans do not give one single 7-11 hot dog's worth of poop about science. I'm sure that helps. It would help more if they were cheaper. After all, if a thing is either a) made out of something that eats plants or b) made out of plants, it makes a lot of sense for the one that skips the middlemoo to be cheaper. Alas, they are not. 1. Centuries-Old Rich Snobs Are Why European Food Is Spice-less You know how white people can't handle spice? Shut up, yes you do. I don't care if you're outraged because you're white. I'm white. Sod off. I feel insulted every time I walk into a Mexican or East Asian restaurant and it tastes like they've toned down the spices because I have light hair, blue eyes, and vampire-pale skin. Don't make assumptions; that's racist. See that ghost pepper over there? Gimme. Cinnamon wasn't always on your cereal and paprika wasn't always on your Doritos. Those spices come from somewhere, and that somewhere is (again) not Indiana. If it seems like I take great pleasure in insulting Indiana, it's because I do. I was born there but had the good sense to escape at the ripe old age of three days. In a few days, I'll be passing through again. Quickly. The rest of this item I won't paste, but go read it; it's about how colonialism ruined everything, including the taste of food. So anyway, now I'm all hungry. Still not going to eat bugs, though. |
| I've done entries in here before on dreams. It might even be too many; a search of "dream" in this blog yields five pages of results. But here's one more anyway. Weird dreams train us for the unexpected, says new theory AI inspires hypothesis that sleeping human brain might try to break its overfamiliarity with daily data A reasonable hypothesis. Let's see if there's anything to back it up, or if it remains speculation. It’s a common enough scenario: you walk into your local supermarket to buy some milk, but by the time you get to the till, the milk bottle has turned into a talking fish. Wait, is this about dreams or LSD? Dreams can be bafflingly bizarre, but according to a new theory of why we dream, that’s the whole point. By injecting some random weirdness into our humdrum existence, dreams leave us better equipped to cope with the unexpected. That's also one reason why we have science fiction and fantasy. Although Hoel’s hypothesis is still untested, an advantage is that it takes the phenomenology of dreams – particularly their sparse, hallucinatory, and narrative content – seriously, rather than viewing it as an unexplained byproduct of other background brain processes. So, no, it remains speculation. But that doesn't mean it's wrong. “However, as with so many theories that dreaming has a function, there is no evidence yet that dreaming is more than an epiphenomenon, a functionless byproduct of neural activity." The idea of "function" can be a tricky one, biologically speaking. The way evolution works, something might start out having no apparent function, and then acquire one that's useful to the organism and promotes survival, which is then passed on. With dreams, well, it seems that dreaming is common to many animals. The question is, even if it is a byproduct of other processes, could it then be useful? I'd guess yes, but I'm hardly an expert. The article finishes with a summation of some of the other possible functions of dreaming. I'm pretty sure I've mentioned some of them in here before. I'm not going to quote them here, but the article should be free to view if you're interested. Of course, there's no reason why it couldn't be a combination of several of these functions (or even others). We have plenty of examples of body parts or processes serving more than one function. The mouth, for example, is used for both talking and chewing (hopefully not at the same time; were you born in a barn?) as well as... well... certain other things. I'm not sure if they've ever been able to tell just when dreaming started along the evolutionary timeline, but as other animals do it, it might have been quite a long time ago -- in which case, it's had plenty of time to gain adaptive function. After all, at first glance, one might think that sleep itself isn't very conducive to individual survival, as it allows predators to sneak up on you. Dreams generally occur during sleep, though, and their benefit might very well outweigh any downsides to periodic unconsciousness. But that's even more speculation, and in this case, coming from someone without any background or credentials. But that's okay -- as with a dream, the meaning can be very personal. |
| I don't really have a whole lot to say about this link, but I'm putting it here for those benighted souls who have never heard of Emperor Norton. Behold: Although I had heard of Norton I, there were still details in this article that were new to me. Of course, it's still Cracked, so I wouldn't take anything here as absolute fact without verifying it, but I know that he indeed existed, and in general, the biography checks out. The year is 1859. The United States is on the verge of a massive split that will eventually lead to the Civil War. As lines are drawn and tensions are running high, a man in San Francisco writes to the local newspaper. His name is Joshua Abraham Norton, and his plan is nothing short of grand. He declares himself Norton I, Emperor of the United States. Many have never even heard about the reign of the United States' first and only monarch ... Like I said, not a lot to paste here, so I'm not even going to go over the Cracked-standard numbered list highlighting. Several times over his 21-year reign, he called for bridges to be built and streets to be repaired, as The Emperor knew that his empire needed strong infrastructure. Many recent government administrations should have learned that lesson, but didn't. Also, it should be noted that Norton was actually quite progressive for the time, and honestly, he deserves praise for that in a way that most people from that era don't deserve. He advocated for the rights of Black Americans in his proclamations, and he fought back against the violence that Chinese immigrants faced in San Francisco. Ditto for this. This story had the potential to get kind of ugly. A delusional guy parading around the city as a monarch who was also frequently publicized in papers for laughs? This sounds like it's just going to be a story about how much people made fun of him. Here's the thing, though: they really didn't. Yeah, people found it funny that he was acting out some royal fantasy, but honestly, they loved him. He became a sort of symbol for the city, and residents were excited when they saw him walking around, almost as though they had a brush with a real monarch. Pretty sure that's a San Francisco tradition that continues to this day. Though they don't do much for the homeless now. Maybe if said homeless dressed up as Emperors... nah. The Emperor Norton Trust is a nonprofit dedicated to preserving his memory, and there have been campaigns in recent years to rename the Bay Bridge that connects San Francisco to Oakland in his honor. I'd get behind that. Anyway, like I said, good read, and a quick one. Perhaps tomorrow I'll end up posting something I could make more in-depth comments on, but for now, just bask in the glory. |
Entry #6 of 8 for "Journalistic Intentions" [18+]. In three words I can sum up everything I learned about life: Counting is easier than it looks. -Spring in my Sox  We don't have just one number system. You probably learned, long ago, about the difference between cardinal and ordinal numbers. If you need a refresher, I found this Basically, cardinal numbers are for quantity; ordinals are for position. From that article: "We use ordinal numbers for dates and the order of something..." Well, I'm pretty sure if I used ordinal numbers for dates, the dates wouldn't last very long "You're the sixth woman I've seen this week" tends to be a "Check, please!" moment. Especially if I say it on a Tuesday morning. Okay, fine, that's a pun and one that's probably beneath me, since I haven't been on a date in mumble mumble mumble. That's English, though. French has a really weird counting system. Well, it's weird to me; I'm sure our way of counting is weird to Francophones. For example, we say today is June twenty-first. In French, you'd say le vingt-et-un juin, which, literally, would mean "the twenty and one June," which sounds more like a cardinal number; their ordinals are more of the form première, seconde, troisième, quatrième, cinquième, etc. This is, of course, not the weirdest thing about French numbers. They don't have a special word for seventy like we do. Instead it's soixante-dix or, literally, "sixty-ten." Then there's sixty-eleven, sixty-twelve... all the way up to four twenties (quatre vingts) for eighty. People who are afraid of math would hate learning French. And also probably reading the rest of this blog entry. See, numbers get even weirder when you realize that our number system doesn't actually start at 1 but at 0 (yes, I'm ignoring negative numbers and a whole slew of things like rationals, irrationals, transcedentals and *ahem* complex numbers). Programmers know this; most older programming languages and some newer ones start array counting at the zeroth element. The array element indexed at 9 is therefore the 10th element. I was thinking about numbers just the other day, which sometimes happens when I don't have distractions, like, in this case, when I was driving on a mostly-empty highway. A couple of weeks ago, my housemate showed me a package of food things (I don't remember what they were; let's say "mozzarella poppers" for the hell of it) that was labeled for two servings and contained... five mozzarella poppers. Why five? If you're going to package something in two servings, freaking make it an even number. Three servings? Multiple of three. It's like trying to evenly split a pizza three ways; you want to cut it into six slices (or twelve, or nine which would be a nightmare). Above all, unless you're putting the food things into a single-serving package, don't make it a prime number. For fuck's sake. This is almost as maddening as how hot dogs are sold in packs of ten, while hot dog buns are sold in packs of eight. To make it all come out even, you'd need five packs of buns and four packs of weenies. I hope you're hungry or have lots of friends. In an attempt to solve that age-old conundrum, I found this site which explains it in great detail, but for the love of sausage, do not click on the embedded video there that shows how franks are made. It's almost enough to turn me into a vegetarian. Well, no, not really.Still, it's important to know these things, as well as knowing the sound of one hand clapping, and the mystery surrounding trees falling in a forest (I can't demonstrate the former online, but the answer to the latter question is: sound is a pressure wave through air, and it's independent of whether there's someone around to hear it or not, so yes, a tree falling in the forest indeed makes a noise). As an aside, I also know why we park in driveways and drive on parkways, but that's beyond our scope here because we were talking about numbers. I was saying that we don't have just one number system. There are, potentially, an infinite number of them. Computers, as you know, do everything in binary, or base-2. So you have 1, 10, 11, 100, 101, 110, 111, 1000, 1001, 1010 and so on. Often those are collected into groups to make base-8 or base-16 (but for some reason, base-4 isn't a thing in computer science, though it's just as legitimate a base as anything else). Some people have proposed trinary computers; since the word for "binary digit" is "bit," I think I'll leave the word for "trinary digit" up to your imagination. (Just don't give it a byte, unless, you know, she's into that sort of thing.) Ancient Sumerian numbering systems were essentially base-12, not base-10, which is why our clocks aren't decimal even if they're digital. The point is, you can take any positive integer and use it as a base for counting, because all it does is tell you when to tack on another digit place, like when an odometer rolls over from 99,999 to 100,000. How you'd symbolize such numbers once you run out of 0-9 and all 26 letters (base-16, for example, contains the numbers A for decimal 10, B for decimal 11, and so on up to F for decimal 15, at which point you finally get to hex 10 which is decimal 16), I'll leave up to more creative people. I'd suggest starting with those symbols above the decimal numerals on a computer keyboard, so a lot of numbers could look like cartoon cuss words, like #%&@!. The point being that base 10 is completely arbitrary, and it may seem natural because most of us (at least those of us who haven't played with fireworks or joined the Yakuza) have ten fingers, tell that to the Sumerians, or to the people who run around barefoot and use base-20. Incidentally, I long ago learned a trick for counting up to 31 by using just the fingers of one hand. It involves treating each finger as a different binary digit. What can I tell you? Such things help me get to sleep (those sheep won't count themselves) and it's useful for counting cards in blackjack. Not, of course, that I would ever do such a thing, because I would like to keep said fingers. My system can, of course, be extended up to 1023 if one were to use both hands, but blackjack card counting never goes that high. And yet, the only number system wherein 3 is equal to 6 is in the Comedy Number System, where pretty much anything goes as long as it elicits at least a chuckle. What three words (not six) can sum up everything I learned about life? "Comedy breaks everything." |
| We interrupt our regular programming to bring you this important message... Do they still say stuff like that? I haven't watched network TV in years. Nay, decades. What with streaming and all, I get to set my own passive entertainment schedule and, bonus, avoid ads. But no, really, today I'm not answering a prompt or discussing a link. Yesterday, I went to see a friend. This is notable because it's the first time since the Before Times that I visited someone else's house. He and his wife have been my friends since, I don't remember, sometime in the 90s. It was his birthday celebration, and five of us just did normal stuff like taking a walk, playing a card game, having a barbecue, and talking about stuff. You know, normal life things. I'm fully aware that there's still a pandemic going on, which is why I decided not to go to Belgium this year, after all; the phased reopening of the EU is tricky to follow and I don't want to go at a time when stuff I want to do isn't available. So, hopefully, that'll happen next year. Meanwhile, I've decided to do a road trip soon, which is mainly what I wanted to talk about here. I've done an entry in this blog every day for just over 18 months now. Usually, I post something shortly after midnight WDC time. When I'm traveling, my schedule will be inconsistent -- I'm still going to shoot for every day, but it's unlikely that they'll all be at the time we've all grown used to here. But, honestly, I'm not going to stress about it; if I have to miss a day because there's other stuff going on, well, so be it. 18 months is, after all, a good run of posts. So. Whenever I tell someone I'll be on a road trip, their first question is, understandably, "Where are you going?" While I get where the question is coming from, my road trips tend to be the living embodiment of "it's about the journey, not the destination." I might even say that there is no destination, only journey. That said, for this trip, I've picked out a few spots completely at random. It just so happens that at least two of those spots are relatively close to good friends from WDC, and I intend to visit them. I also intend to visit breweries and other points of interest. I also take my time, often avoiding interstates. While US interstate highways a) are an everyday marvel of civil engineering (which was my professional life); b) represent a nice fast way to get from Point A to Point B; c) provide travel services such as food, gas, lodging, and toilets, most of which are helpfully signed; and d) were a triumph of infrastructure planning at the Federal level which couldn't be replicated today if we tried; they're also, with a few exceptions, exceedingly boring. I use 'em if I'm in a hurry, usually on the return trip when I'm starting to get tired of driving. Consequently, if you happen to live near a place where I'm going to be passing through and want to grab a drink or whatever, I might be able to arrange that. But I don't precisely know where I'm going to be, except central Minnesota and, later, the Salt Lake City area. After that, probably I'll take a more southern route back east. If not, there's (hopefully) going to be a next time. Make it worth my while (i.e. buy me a beer) and I might even be persuaded to take a detour. My plan right now is to leave on Saturday. This means I'll be traveling over the July 4th weekend, which may suck, but the only other alternative would be to wait until after that holiday to start the trip, and I'd rather not wait that long. So until then, blogging as normal. After that, well, we'll see. |
| Yesterday, I finally got around to seeing Wednesday's episode of Marvel's Loki (and, later, a movie -- see below). So for anyone who's happened to see that episode, today's article is especially fortuitous. Reconstructing the Menu of a Pub in Ancient Pompeii Eat like a first-century Roman, using recent archaeological discoveries as your guide. In the second century, Pliny the Younger wrote a letter to the Roman historian Tacitus, recounting the early stages of the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD. As this article is about a pub menu, it is even more fortuitous that there is a rare and highly-sought-after beer called Pliny the Younger. It's a triple IPA from Russian River in California, and I've never had it because I generally dislike West Coast IPAs. A day after Pliny observed that dark cloud, a small tavern in a northeastern section of Pompeii collapsed, along with the rest of the town, under the weight of pumice and ash. This was later followed by a fast-moving pyroclastic surge of hot gas, volcanic debris, and ash that signaled the volcano’s final devastating blow: Those who stayed behind in Pompeii and Herculaneum were killed instantly by this infernal wave of heat, estimated to have been as high as 900° Fahrenheit. The barkeep of this tavern was one of these poor souls. He didn’t make it out of the establishment in time and perished in the cot where he slept, along with a dog and a man who had taken refuge inside the tavern with them. Honestly, I can think of worse ways (and places) to perish. In December 2020, archaeologists at the Archaeological Park of Pompeii announced that they had found the remains of these two men and the dog as they were excavating this ancient food establishment, known as a thermopolium. I mean, sure, everyone (I hope) knows the story of Pompeii. I think it's awesome that they're still making discoveries there. Well. Rediscoveries, technically. As a classical archaeologist whose research centers on food and food preparation in the Roman Mediterranean, I am overjoyed by finds like these, as the information obtained from them shines a bright light on the daily lives of classes of Roman society that are poorly represented in ancient literary sources: slaves and average, working Romans. Wait, you mean they didn't have McDonald'ses? What a horrible time to have lived. Vesuvius would have represented a sweet release. To recreate a meal that comes close to what may have been served here, one can begin by looking at the archaeological remains found inside. The rest of the article goes into the findings and, as a bonus, provides a recipe. Spoiler: not even pizza! Does all of this evidence suggest that meat boiled in broth at the corner popina is the Roman version of pub grub? No burgers, no fish & chips, no Buffalo wings (which I consider to be a bonus; those things suck), and not even French fries. The recipe, if you're not inclined to visit the site (you should; Atlas Obscura is my third favorite website), is for braised duck. Now, I have a personal rule against eating anything smarter than I am; this includes cuttlefish, cat, and duck. I do make an exception for bacon, as it's bacon. But I try not to impose my personal preferences on anyone else. So there you have it. You can call it Volcano Duck, maybe. Or just read the article and marvel at what we've rediscovered through the wonders of archaeology.  One-Sentence Movie Review: The Hitman's Wife's Bodyguard This film has almost everything I look for in a movie: Samuel L. Jackson, Ryan Reynolds, Salma Hayek, other big stars, gunfights, chases, explosions, great stunt work, snappy dialogue, and marvelous dark humor; in fact, the only thing it doesn't have is anything more than a basic plot -- the lack of which barely diminished my enjoyment of the spectacle. Rating: 4.5/5 |
| The Random Number Gods have had a nice chuckle at my expense. Over fifty possible links to select from, and I get the one about Superman the day after I made a Souperman pun. Article is from Cracked and dated March 1, but that doesn't change the basic message. Between the debuts of Zack Snyder's Justice League and Superman & Lois, this month is shaping up to be unusually Supermanly. I have yet to see the Snyder cut (I know, I know... bad nerd) but I have been watching S&L, and I find it to be very well-written with competent acting -- a bit too heavy on the teen drama aspects for my taste, but that's on me. A common complaint about Superman is that he's just too damn powerful, which is kind of like saying that the Grand Canyon is too damn grand, or that your Baconator came with too much damn bacon. Still, a lot of people seem to think it's impossible to tell interesting stories with a character who's practically invincible ... including some of the writers and studio execs whose job it is to make those stories. It is, indeed, difficult to write meaningful stories about a character who verges on the omnipotent. As something of a writer myself, I know you have to come up with challenges for the character, and there's only so much you can do with Kryptonite before it gets boring. The trick, which is used in S&L, is to focus on the few things the character isn't super-powered at; for instance, dealing with the aforementioned teen drama. (For those out of the loop, S&L features a Clark who is married to Lois and they have two teen sons.) 4. His Powers Aren't Random: He's A Walking Catalogue Of Active Superpowers The Complaint: "Why does Superman have to have so many powers, anyway?! Look at Batman, he's got none and he's cool!" Doesn't he, though? Like I said, I haven't seen the Snyder Cut, but in the Whedon version (or maybe it was an earlier Affleck Batman), I remember a line of dialogue like, "What's your superpower?" "I'm very rich." Batman also, traditionally, has the superpower of knowing exactly what tool he needs for any given situation. And he also gets advantage on Stealth rolls. These aren't sold as "superpowers" because Batman is more of a "I could be him if I were rich and worked out a lot" kind of character, but no amount of money or weight-lifting can help you match wits with Joker. First of all, the ability to be hugely rich and not be a massive piece of trash is a more fantastic superpower than any of Superman's, so there's that. Also this. But also, Superman's powers didn't come about because someone said "let's just make this guy impossible to beat," like video game developers creating an annoying final boss. They grew organically across several decades in a way that's intrinsically linked to the evolution of the superhero genre itself. That's a good point, and the article goes into the character's changes over the years. 3. He Continually Ups The Stakes ... For ALL Superheroes (Even In Other Companies) The Complaint: "Dude's got it too easy! He can stop any crime in like two seconds! And all his villains suck!" I'mma stop this complaint right here. Lex Luthor is (usually) an excellent villain (especially the John Cryer version, though he's only on Supergirl for now). One exception is the Jokerish version of Lex Luthor foisted upon us by the Justice League movies, thus demonstrating that you really have to match the villain's strengths to the hero's weaknesses. Speaking of Lex Luthor and rich people, has anyone else noticed Jeff Bezos' uncanny resemblance to Luthor? Most Superman baddies are merely excuses to force Superman to face important issues he can't easily solve -- human greed, the dangers of media manipulation, what if a being from the fifth dimension turns your friends into cows, etc. But we'll admit that not all writers realize this, which is why they keep trying to make it look like a guy who makes explosive teddy bears could be a real threat to a near-omnipotent being. I mean, seriously, this article goes into even weirder stuff than this, and it's worth reading if only from a writer's perspective. 2. He Isn't Just Wish-Fulfillment; He's Aspirational The Complaint: "He's just a power fantasy! Grow up and read about more complex characters, like the suave super-spy who has sex with lots of attractive women!" I mean, really, I've been saying this for years now. Not the "complaint" part but the bolded part. In the best Superman stories, the powers are incidental -- they're more interesting for the ethical aspects. Superman, on the other hand, embodies traits that are actually desirable in a functioning society, like restraint and responsibility. Couldn't the writers do that without giving him so many powers, or at least giving him crap ones? Sure, look at Spider-Man, whose most commonly used power is "using his wrists as spider butts." However, the importance of Superman's sense of discipline is way more effective coming from someone who could accidentally kill you while sneezing... In our world, most of us don't have superhuman powers, but the things we do even as worker drones or ordinary peasants can and do have an effect on others. If it takes writing fantasy about someone who could fly through an airplane in mid-air, killing hundreds of people, but doesn't, to work as a metaphor for those limited powers that we do have -- so be it. I mean, lots of us have the means to end at least one person's life in an instant (knives, guns, whatever), but a glance at the news will tell you that some people don't have the responsibility needed to not use them. 1. Some Of His Best Stories Don't Even Involve Powers (That Much) The Complaint: "Nice try, Cracked, but I still think he's too powerful! Also I don't know why I'm shouting every sentence, please help me!" This sort of thing is why I keep reading Cracked. The rest of this section is a summary of some great Superman stories where he didn't have powers and pushed through anyway. If it seems like you have to jump through a lot of hoops to make a good Superman story, that's because you do. Superman's invincibility offers a more structured form of storytelling -- he's the superhero genre's equivalent of trying to write a haiku that's also an acrostic that also doesn't contradict 83 years of continuity (or some nerds will get very angry at you). So when those writers and studio execs say it's "impossible" to tell interesting Superman stories, what they mean is that it's "harder." But when they put in the effort, the results can be transcendental. And when they don't, well ... watching him punch robots is also fun, to be honest. That last line really sums it up for me. While seeing nothing but that would get boring fast, there is always the spectacle. And isn't that what visual entertainment is for? Anyway, the article is a pretty good essay on how to write overpowered characters and keep them interesting. I remember a time, maybe in the 70s or 80s, when Superman stories were heavily about the hoops he jumped through to keep Lois from discovering his secret identity. Yeah, the character has had his ups and downs. But mostly ups. Ups. And aways. |
| Entry #5 of 8 for "Journalistic Intentions" [18+] I suppose I could launch into a monologue that blasts the social expectation that men aren't supposed to cry. The pressure to conform to that stricture is still there, because we have yet to fully move beyond the whole patriarchal gender roles thing. But you know, I'm not in the mood for social criticism right now. So instead I'll talk about how I finally learned to make French onion soup. Cooking is another thing that men were traditionally not supposed to do. Well. Cooking at home, anyway, because that's not a paid job. It's always been quite alright for men to be restaurant cooks. This has to do with the perceived difference in value between "women's work" and "men's work," and... Dammit. There I go again. Anyway, fortunately, that particular taboo has been greatly eroded. Which is a good thing because if I were not allowed to cook, I'd be broke or dead from either eating out all the time or not eating at all. This is why single men don't live as long, on average. Yeah, most of what I make is of the quick and easy variety. This is because I don't see much point in slaving over a hot stove for hours to make an elaborate meal for just me. Sometimes I'll make something and share it with my housemate, but mostly we do our own cooking. But late last year, I got it in my head to make French onion soup because it was winter and I wanted some. Besides, everyone needed a pandemic hobby, right? It's a dish that takes a good bit of time, but there aren't that many ingredients and you can make a large batch to have leftovers. It might surprise you that the principal ingredient in French onion soup is onions. Not French. And it takes beaucoup d'oignons. Er, I mean, a lot of onions. Oodles and oodles of them. And you gotta halve each one, and then slice each half into thin half-rings. While it's not as hazardous to the tear glands as completely chopping the annoying buggers, it still has the potential to aerosolize onion juice, which can lead to eye irritation. There are a few ways around this hazard. The first is to use white or red onions, not yellow onions. This, however, results in a less flavorful soup. Or, well, I think it does; I haven't tried it with anything but yellow, but in other recipes the other varieties just aren't as tangy. The second is to have someone else cut the onions for you. This is out of the question for me, but it's always good to delegate. Just don't make your kids do it, or guaranteed you'll end up with bloody onions and them in the ER. The third is to cut them under running water. This is a pain in the ass, and has the potential to make things more slippery -- see above about blood. The fourth is cheating: wear goggles. That way the onion spray can't get to your eyeballs. Just remember not to touch your eyelids after you're done and have removed the goggles. Also remember to clean the goggles afterward. Honestly? I don't do any of these things. Sometimes my eyes get a little irritated, yeah, but then I just wet a paper towel and wipe my eyelids with it. Anyway, chopping all those damn onions is the most labor-intensive part of making French onion soup. The rest is mostly just caramelizing the onions, simmering them in broth and a few other secret ingredients, and, after topping each bowl with bread and cheese, making sure you don't broil the cheese so long it becomes charcoal. (I've always managed to get it right because I'm awesome). I'm not going to provide the whole recipe. I found it online and so can you, and you might even find one that suits your taste better than the one I found. But I will note a few tips:  Experiment with the bread. I have had excellent results with challah, but that may be too chewy for some people. Traditionally, one uses baguette slices. The optimum cheese combination is (in my own opinion of course) Gruyere mixed with a little bit of grated Parmesan. Sure, Parmesan isn't French, but who cares? Other than the French. Don't tell them, but all of their cuisine came from somewhere else too, just like almost everyone's. Get a set of those purpose-made ceramic French onion soup bowls. It just doesn't work as well in a standard bowl. They're not all that expensive and you might even find some used.In any case, the bread and cheese are not optional. Wow. Normally after doing an entry like this I get hungry, but I don't have the three hours or so that it takes to do the recipe. Besides, I'm out of onions. So sad it makes me want to cry. But I won't, because I'm a guy. |
| Nothing profound or, hopefully, controversial today; mostly just a lesson in how not to write a headline. And maybe some physics... but no math, so don't run away just yet. The singing neutrino Nobel laureate who nearly bombed Nevada From desert to gold mine — Frederick Reines was a larger-than-life physicist who did larger-than-life experiments. I mean, neutrinos sing? I admit I'm not up on all the latest advances in physics, but I didn't know we taught them to- oh. It's the scientist who sang. Article is a book review, but also functions as a summary of the guy's bio. I shouldn't have to mention once again that I don't automatically shy away from book-shilling articles here on a writing site, but I just did anyway. In the early 1950s, the physicist Frederick Reines and his colleague Clyde Cowan designed an experiment to detect neutrinos From what I've read about physics, this was a Big Deal. Theoretical physicists can come up with all sorts of hypotheses, but it takes experimental physicists to support (or disprove) them. Very few physicists delve into both. The experiment was to take place in the Nevada desert. A flux of neutrinos would be created by detonating a 20-kiloton nuclear bomb I can see the grant proposal now. "First, we build an atom bomb..." At the last minute, Reines and Cowan transferred the experiment to a nuclear reactor Aw. It's implied that the bomb went boom anyway, as they were wont to do back in the 1950s. However, I seriously doubt that "at the last minute" should be taken literally. The neutrino-research community has mushroomed over the decades It's always amusing to see a pun, intended or not, in articles like this one. The article then goes into the aforementioned summary of Reines' life. Neutrinos were nicknamed ghost particles because of their uncanny properties. Turns out they're even weirder than scientists first thought, but that's another topic. Still, I wouldn't be surprised if, as with the "God Particle" (the Higgs boson) decades later, the media didn't latch on to this and create the entirely wrong impression. But with no charge and a vanishingly small mass, they can be detected only indirectly, when they interact with another particle. Okay, but technically, that's the only way to detect anything. As Cole describes, Reines and Cowan began what they named Project Poltergeist at a plutonium-producing reactor in Hanford, Washington. Project Poltergeist, plutonium-producing... come on, there have to have been more opportunities for alliteration in there. Reines left Los Alamos in 1959 for the Case Institute in Cleveland, Ohio. Seven years later, he moved to the University of California, Irvine. Note how there is nothing reported for Reines during his time in Cleveland. I like to think that this is because nothing good ever happens in Cleveland. Anyway, like I said, nothing of tremendous import to most people, and this is more of an example of science book review writing than anything else. But there were enough little amusing things to make me want to include it here. |
| One of the cool things about science fiction is that we SF readers are rarely surprised by new tech. This is not always a good thing. This article describes some things that some of us use every day, or at least is just over the horizon, but almost all technology was first imagined in science fiction. Not only is today’s tech far more powerful than it was 20 years ago, but a lot of the gadgets we thought of as science fiction have become part of our lives. Heck, in some cases, this technology has become so ubiquitous that we don’t even think about it as being cutting-edge tech. This "we" you're talking about, I do not believe it means what you think it means. Self-driving cars As recently as 2004, well-respected economists Frank Levy and Richard Murnane of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard, respectively, argued in their book The New Division of Labor that driving a vehicle was a task only a human could do. Just as you can almost always find a science fiction prediction for any given invention, you can often find examples of people who claim it's unlikely or even impossible. Breaking the sound barrier comes to mind. Hell, even cars -- I remember seeing someone's prognostication that cars will never go above some arbitrarily low speed because the human body just can't deal with higher velocities. Well, it's true there's a limit, mostly having to do with our perceptions and reflexes, but it's much higher than the naysayers predicted. A caution though: the reverse isn't true. Sometimes when someone says something can't be done, it can't be done. Now, I could write an entire blog entry - hell, a series of blog entries - on the subject of self-driving cars, but this isn't the place for it. Suffice it to say, for now, that I, for one, welcome our new autonomous vehicle overlords. Universal translators The thinking person’s ray gun, the universal translator is the pocket-sized gadget seen in many a science fiction movie. Today, devices like smart earbuds can do a pretty great job of real-time, speech-based translation. A person can also point their camera phone at text written in another language and get it translated back to them right away. Admittedly, this has been getting better. I've noticed that, for instance, the old standby Google Translate has improved over the years, and there's no logical reason why improvements couldn't continue. However, there are real advantages to learning other languages. Even if a UT could be as perfect as the ones on Star Trek (except, of course, when the plot calls for it to be less than perfect), it's still a boon for personal growth to immerse oneself in another language. Personalized advertising This one’s not quite as sexy as the others on this list. But that also just goes to show how ubiquitous it’s become. In the 2002 movie Minority Report, there’s a scene in which Tom Cruise’s protagonist John Anderton walks past a billboard that screams out to him, “John Anderton! You could use a Guinness right about now.” A couple of decades later, the idea of an ad that addresses us personally, using our name and targeted based on our expressed likes and dislikes, is an everyday part of our lives. The other purpose of science fiction is to warn us away from undesirable outcomes. Stories about cloning, or flubbing First Contact situations, or developing fully autonomous AI androids (you know, like in that other PKD-inspired movie), are meant as warnings. However, I'm not as opposed to targeted advertising as some people are. While there are definitely privacy concerns, I'd rather see ads for men's clothing, beer (I wonder how much Guinness paid for that particular product placement), video games, travel services and the like than for things like laxatives, tampons, or monster truck rallies. Not that there's anything inherently wrong with those things; I just have no use for them myself, so don't waste your money and my time trying to sell me them. That said, yesterday I was having lunch with a friend. At one point, we discussed maybe going to Vegas (if, you know, there's still water there when we're able to go). Our phones dinged a couple of minutes later, and we both got promotional emails from casinos. Probably a coincidence. Probably. Touchscreens everywhere A touchscreen used to be as much shorthand for “you’re watching a sci-fi show or movie” as form-fitting jumpsuits and aliens with weird foreheads. While touchscreens did exist in the real world (the first resistive touchscreen technology was shown off in 1982), it was nowhere near as buttery smooth or intuitive as filmmakers liked to suggest. Touchscreens annoy me. Give me a laptop with a keyboard and mouse; I can never get my finger to put a cursor in the right place on a touchscreen. The screen keyboards are clunky as fuck, and autocorrect was clearly programmed by Loki. Still, there's no other way to do smartphones, really, and the rest of the interface is intuitive enough. This one might be a cheat, though. I don't remember seeing much in the way of touchscreens in SF before ST:TNG, which came out after 1982. Also, I distinctly remember prototype touchscreens in meatspace before that year, but they may have used different tech. Voice assistants Rarely do as much as I wish they would, and half the time they don't understand what I'm saying. That said, when I'm sitting at a bar and hear a song I like that I don't recognize, being able to go "Hey Google, what song is playing?" makes me feel like I'm living in the future. Video calling Meanwhile, most people have become more accustomed to video chat platforms like Zoom, Hangouts, and Skype over the past year than they ever thought they would. Video calling is so ubiquitous that, in the age of working from home, it’s quite possible to unironically say, “Not another video call? This is my fifth this week,” prior to picking up a tablet computer thinner than a deck of cards, and having a conversation with people sometimes located on the other side of the planet. I might have said this before, but they tried rolling out video calling back in the 70s, if I recall correctly. Even had prototypes. People freaked the hell out. I mean, you do them in SF movies so you can see the actors' facial expressions without having to do that annoying split-screen shot that was ubiquitous in movies and TV of the time, or just to make something look like The Future. But I remember when they tried to promote it, there was this general consensus of "No way! What if the phone rings while I'm in the shower?" Because at the time we were conditioned to a) always answer the phone (no voice mail, no answering machines, could be something important) and apparently the idea that you could flip the camera to "off" (or even cover it like we all do with our webcams now, just in case) never occurred to anyone. Robot exosuits No, thanks. I'm kind of surprised GPS didn't make this list. It might be the most technically advanced, in some ways, of any of our everyday gadgets, and it was a niche thing at best 20 years ago. Of course, some people still freak out about it ("I heard about someone who followed their GPS and drove into a lake!" as if no one ever got lost or stuck trying to follow a paper map), but it's essential for a lot of things right now. Unless something even worse than a pandemic occurs, though, things will keep being invented and perfected. Want to know what things? Read more science fiction. |
| Sometimes I need to be reminded that words have power -- for good or ill. And sometimes it takes a juvenile dick joke website to remind me of that. (Incidentally, today's title is also related to my name for cryptocurrencies, "Dunning-Krugerrands." Unfortunately, I don't get enough opportunity to use that phrase, because I'm always concerned that people won't get the joke.) Ayn Rand is unfortunately still popular, because reading good books is hard. She's best known for Atlas Shrugged, a boring lecture on the tenets of objectivism disguised as a boring novel. Objectivism, if you don't want to read the angry 5,000 word comments that spawn whenever Rand is mentioned, boils down to the belief that pure self-interest is the highest ideal humanity can have. The way I see it, it's in my self-interest to be kind to, respect, and help other people. We're here today because a bunch of Rand-worshipping bozos fought reality and lost, or at least made asses of themselves. So let's look at some asses. I'm not really a butt perso- oh. You meant that figuratively. 4. Ayn Rand Inspired The CEO Of Sears (To Ruin Sears) In academia, Rand's reputation is about level with phrenology's. A Rand biography wrote that critics "dismiss Rand as a shallow thinker appealing only to adolescents" and, perhaps not coincidentally, celebrities are big fans. But a lot of people only cite Rand as an influence because she's trendy, or offers superficial thoughtfulness. I dunno. Compared to Rand's philosophy, phrenology is settled science. In 2008, Sears was struggling. But that was okay, because Eddie Lampert -- the "Steve Jobs of the investment world" -- was CEO. His solution: skim Rand CliffsNotes. Lampert split Sears into divisions ordered to selfishly compete for his time and money, because he believed that with only their own self-interest to pursue each division could achieve record profits. I'm not a philosopher, or a CEO. Yes, I co-ran a business for a while, but it was a small business. That hardly makes me an expert. But even I can see that there's no way this ends well -- even if I didn't already know how it ends. The story of Sears should be used to warn MBA candidates about what not to do, even before Lampert took over -- you know, the way they show engineering students the video of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge failure. . That company was on top of the world for a very long time -- not just figuratively, but for a while there they owned and occupied the tallest building on the planet. They got that way by providing mail-order goods to rural locations, through their famous catalog, and stayed that way by providing quality merchandise. Hell, for a while there, they sold freakin' prefab houses by mail-order.Had they played their cards right, they'd have been on top of the internet, and Amazon would be a second-rate contender. But they ignored this internet thing, even though it aligned with their original mission, because by the time the internet came along, Sears had ceased being a retailer and became a finance company with showrooms. And it all went downhill from there, which is when Lampert got involved and, because he read puerile literature (as opposed to puerile comedy websites), he started that whole "internal competition" thing. Naturally, he's still worth over a billion dollars and owns a yacht called Fountainhead, because if there's one thing Rand definitely loved it was rewarding the incompetent. Obviously, the damage Rand has done to society isn't limited to one finance / showroom company, but I see that debacle as a fractal microcosm of the bigger problems. 3. The Co-Creator Of Spider-Man And Dr. Strange Created (Terrible) Objectivist Superheroes They really didn't have to add "terrible" in parentheses there. It's redundant. To summarize the first bit here, Ditko was partly responsible for Spider-Man and Dr. Strange, so his creations weren't all terrible. But... Mr. A tended to murder criminals or, worse, lecture them about the beauty of the free market. The thin plots often grind to a halt for his monologues, because one of the key tenets of objectivism is that morality plays must make Goofus and Gallant look nuanced. Clearly, he also took writing lessons from the Rand School of Expository Monologue Ditko also created The Question, who's basically the indie Mr. A toned down for mainstream comics. If these characters sound familiar, that's because Alan Moore's Rorschach was inspired by how much Moore loathed them. I always thought Moore killing off Rorschach at the end of Watchmen was a kind of revenge fantasy (yeah, I know, spoiler, but if you haven't experienced Watchmen by now it's on you), and this just confirms it. 2. Rand Fandom Made Penn Jillette Act Like An Obnoxious Teenager Not every Rand fixation has to end in tragedy or disaster; it can merely be embarrassing. And, like many embarrassing things, we begin with magicians. Yes, I like Penn and Teller. But just as with any human beings, they have flaws. Being an Objectivist is a serious flaw, but they still do good work. Coincidentally, another flaw with objectivism is its adherents' belief in the unique rationality of their framework. They'll tell you they have the only philosophy unfettered by dogma, and if you disagree then you just have to read their favorite books until you realize they're right. "Unfettered by dogma" except for the utterances of their Great Goddess Rand, of course. 1. Silicon Valley Loves To Cherry Pick Ayn Rand In Rand's work, a happy ending is when successful people swat aside whiners to get even more money. Not surprisingly, she's big in Silicon Valley. Travis Kalanick, who invented a taxi company that dodges responsibility for sexual assaults, is a fan. So is Brian Armstrong, who asks Coinbase employees to not be political about the cryptocurrency pyramid scheme that uses more electricity than Ireland. And of course there's Elon Musk, who's hard at work saving humanity with ideas like "What if roads were useless death traps?" Uber (the company formerly associated with Kalanick) has much bigger ethical issues than dodging responsibility for sexual assaults (which is saying something), and everything about them screams "Randian Dystopia." Doesn't stop me from using them, because it would be more unethical for me to drive drunk. "But Waltz... couldn't you just... you know... not drink?" "Shut up." In Rand's defense, the average reading of her is superficial. Her heroes are supermen, but part of that superiority comes from their sense of justice. A Randian hero demands hard work, but also rewards it; ignoring a toxic workplace or firing people because you're grumpy would get you an angry ass-kicking from Mr. A. Whether you want a world where CEOs are the ultimate arbiters of justice is another matter, but Silicon Valley's worship of Rand is like making Captain America your role model because he gets to beat up people. And to be fair, it's been a while since I had a nice slog through anything that horrid woman wrote, so my memory may be only of the superficial as well. But fortunately, there's Cracked. Just to be clear, I'm not saying "Ayn Rand's books should be canceled" or any crap like that. But I do suggest reading them with a healthy dose of cynicism. Which is how I read almost everything. |
Another "Journalistic Intentions" [18+] entry, #4 of 8: Grifters Come in All Demographics Is This Millionaire a Cult Leader? is the title of the video on YouTube. I'm not going to cover the same ground as the video. I'm going to go off on some tangents. On Being Rich "Rich," of course, is a relative thing. I recall some studies once that found that for most people, it's unnecessary to be wealthy in absolute terms, but only in relative terms. Like, you have a peer group you compare yourself to, and you want to be the target of that peer group's envy, not have a target of envy yourself. Nor is it necessary, psychologically, to actually be rich; you just have to project the image. I remember one of my employees, back when I had employees, commenting on a client's Porsche. "He must be rich," she said, or something like that. "He has a Porsche." It's that mentality he was catering to with his sports car (I think it worked, in that case, as I once saw them together downtown - which was, and is, none of my business, but it's relevant to the point I'm trying to make.) That point is that the outward trappings of wealth work, if by "work" you mean convincing people that you're successful and thus gaining some intangible social credit (or boning people in their 20s). Now, I don't know this particular guy's actual financial situation, other than that his company could afford to hire mine. But sometimes they didn't pay. Whether this was because they couldn't, or because they just thought they could get away with it (they couldn't; I had a policy of stopping work immediately upon a bill becoming 30 days overdue) I don't know. But, in general, if you're running around in a Porsche and flashing a Rolex, you're deep in debt and trying not to show how broke you actually are. Meanwhile, my own car from that era (a beat-up pickup truck) was paid off, and my house was, at the time, well on its way to being so. Who do you think is richer: a guy in a $1000 suit, or a guy in $40 worth of jeans and a t-shirt? Monkey brain says "suit." Rational mind says "t-shirt." Because the latter has, by definition, $960 more than the former. Of course some people are wealthier than others. But just by looking at the stuff someone has, you can't know if they paid for it out of pocket cash, or if they're drowning in debt. On Getting Rich There are a few ways to get rich. The easiest, but most unlikely, is winning a lottery. It does happen, but counting on it is counterproductive. There's also inheritance, running a successful business, landing a book or movie deal, or having a talent that's in demand (such as acting or computer science or whatever) and getting paid to use it. But regardless of the method, I'm going to tell you the actual, true secret of getting rich. Right here, right now, for free, no strings attached. You're not going to like it, but here it is. Don't spend money. That's it. That's the One True Rule for Getting Wealthy. There are no shortcuts, no workarounds. Even someone who wins the lottery can quickly find themselves broke again if they don't abide by this One True Rule. You can lose your inheritance, run your company into the ground, or find yourself kicked out of Hollywood if you don't remember the Rule. "But, Waltz... what's the point of having money if you can't spend it?" Well, obviously, you're going to spend some money. You have to, generally, in order to satisfy basic needs like food, shelter, clothing, and beer. And yes, I don't think life's worth living if you can't also budget a few luxuries, and you'll obviously spend money on them. So the nuanced rule is: Don't spend more than you take in. And the addendum to the nuanced rule is: Put the excess in a place where it can earn you more money. But that, and other tips, are beyond the scope of this entry. For just $15,000, I can give you the rest of the secrets... On Avoiding Scams Don't do that. I mean, okay, sure, you can give me $15K and I'll actually tell you more, if you really want to, but there's nothing I can tell you that's not freely available out there. In general, though, people who are asking enormous sums of money for their "secrets" have a simple secret: selling their books (or conferences or seminars or videos or whatever). It works, or people wouldn't give them money. Now, I'm not going to sneer at anyone shelling out $20 for a self-help book (unless it's The Secret; fuck that noise). But if you think that the value of information scales by price -- that is, that a $2000 book is more useful than a $200 book which is more useful than a $20 book -- you'd be wrong. There's a lot of people out there competing for your money. Some of their products are even worth it -- depending on your own needs and desires, which are different from everyone else's. And I know it can be frustrating to feel like you're lacking something that seemingly everyone else has, and in our consumer culture it seems like the best way to remedy this lack is by spending money. Sometimes that's the case -- for me, what I lack is beer, and I fill that need by buying it -- but often it's a psychological trick, like the book in the embedded video above that has something like "$1500" crossed out and a "marked down" price of $995 or whatever (it went by too fast for me to read the numbers, but the actual price is irrelevant). It's like my friend's ex-wife, who came home once with $1000 worth of clothing. "It was on sale, 50% off! I saved $500!" No, you spent $500. Sales aren't always scams, of course, but they are designed to trick you out of your money. Anyway, I've droned on long enough. Point is: don't fall for scams. This requires the ability to realize when something is a scam, though, and that's the hard part.  Edit: I forgot to post mini-contest results!  I blame beer.Had a lot of great comments -- some I knew about, and some I didn't. The Tycho Brahe one was one of the former; as you know, I love astronomy, and the story of Tycho Brahe and his fake nose (his original schnoz was lost in a duel) is legendary. But for today, I'm going to have to go with the first response, from 🌕 HuntersMoon  -- I'd never heard of Clement Vallandigham, but he counts as "moderately" famous, and his death is part of the long-standing American tradition of doing stupid things with guns, in the subset of doing stupid things with guns that were supposedly unloaded but weren't (one of the first things you learn as an American is that there's no such thing as an unloaded gun). A bit of research (if you can call a quick scan of Wikipedia "research") also told me that his client, who, as noted, was acquitted, died four years later... from a gunshot wound. Anyway, the MB goes to 🌕 HuntersMoon this time, but there will be other opportunities soon. |
| "’Tis impossible to be sure of any thing but Death and Taxes." -Christopher Bullock, 1716 The above quote about "death and taxes" is probably more famously ascribed to Ben Franklin, who died at the age of 84 and whose last words were reportedly, "a dying man can do nothing easy." 84 is a good run now, let alone in the 18th century. But whether 84 or 24, most deaths pass unremarked by the general public... unless the corpse was a famous figure in life. Most of us don't choose the time and place of our demise, with notable exceptions such as Hunter S. Thompson. But the article linked above details some of the odd passings experienced by famous writers. Fair warning: the best ones are from the Greeks. Obviously! But yes, Poe is in there. At least one source claims that Evelyn Waugh died “after attending an upsettingly modern Easter Mass,” but others suggest it was just the opposite... I had to look up who Waugh was, because I'd never even heard of him. More interesting than his death was that he married a woman who was also named Evelyn. The death of Poe is a long-standing mystery. A lot of people didn't like the movie The Raven, the 2012 one with John Cusack. This is a real shame, because I think most viewers missed the point -- which was to make Poe's death (the events of the movie were clearly a dream or hallucination) something heroic. Still, it's fiction -- as is appropriate, I suppose. They promised us Greeks, so here's Aeschylus: He went outside the walls of the Sicilian city in which he was staying and sat down in a sunny spot. An eagle flying over with a tortoise in its talons mistook his shiny bald head for a stone. It dropped the tortoise on Aeschylus’s head, so that it could break its shell and eat its flesh. By that blow the source and beginning of tragedy in its more powerful form was extinguished. Makes you wonder if, had he lived, he'd have invented gravity long before Newton. [Francis] Bacon died of pneumonia in 1626, but according to John Aubrey’s Brief Lives, his illness was the result of a bizarre experiment to find out if “flesh might not be preserved in snow, as in salt.” Appropriate for someone named Bacon. Camus died in a car crash. Simple enough, right? ...Apparently, Camus once said that the most absurd way to die was in a car accident. I can think of far more absurd ways to die, but most of them involve alcohol and maybe prostitutes. As the story goes, Li [Bai] was drunkenly boating on the Yangtze River, and became so enamored of the moon’s reflection on the water that he tried to embrace it—and promptly drowned. A fitting death for a poet, amirite? Or, you know... that. Or getting beaned by a turtle. Common knowledge has it that Christopher Marlowe died in a bar fight—stabbed in the eye after a dispute over the tab, no less. But is that really what happened? I mean, really, what's this one doing here? We all know that Tennessee Williams choked to death on a bottle cap, but perhaps like me, you’ve always wondered: well, how? Hey, now, we've all had that drunken escapade wherein we forget to take the cap off a bottle of beer before slugging it down. Most of us haven't died from that, though. Yet. Less than a month before his 30th birthday, the lyric poet and husband of Mary Shelley drowned when his sailboat was caught in a storm in the Gulf of Spezia. I like how he's taking second fiddle to his wife here. But the really good legend is this: that after Shelley’s body washed up on shore, it was cremated—but his heart refused to burn. The story goes that Edward Trelawny plucked the unburnt heart from the pyre and took it home to Mary Shelley, and it was eventually buried with their son. At least she didn't take her own literature too seriously, or we'd have Frankenpercy right now. Here’s another tragedian of ancient Greece who supposedly died in an extravagant manner—legend has it that Euripides was torn apart by wild dogs. Really? Only the second Greek on the list and it's a probably apocryphal story about wild dogs? Come on, there have to be better literary death stories than this. Which means it's time for a... Merit Badge Mini-Contest! Know any good -- by which I mean bad -- death stories? You don't have to limit it to famous writers; anyone moderately-to-well-known will do. The one I like best (which will probably be the most ironic one, or the funniest, and yes, death can be funny) will earn the commenter a Merit Badge. So no ordinary ones or depressing ones like the many entertainers who committed suicide, please. Deadline, as always, is the end of the day today, Saturday June 12, WDC time |
| Just a little fun today. Some of the products we use daily have functions most of us are completely unaware of. Yeah, like my mobile phone. Did you know you could use it as a phone? 1. THE TINY “EXTRA” POCKET ON YOUR JEANS You’ve probably noticed that some of your jeans have a small pocket located in one of the front pockets. Many people think the tiny addition is meant to keep coins from jingling around in the larger pocket, but according to Levi’s, they created it to provide extra protection for pocket watches. And no one has pocket watches anymore, except for truly eccentric attention-whores and, well, me, but mine's a family heirloom locked up somewhere safe. Which means that jeans outlived pocket watches. There's something to be said about fashion that doesn't go out of style. 2. THE HOLE IN YOUR POT HANDLE Most pots and many pans are designed with a small hole at the end of the handle. While they make for an easy way to hang your pots and pans when they're not in use, they were also designed with another purpose in mind: as a way to hold your spoon or spatula in place over the pot itself, and save yourself from making a mess of your stovetop. Yeah, I've seen this idea floating around for a while. I call bullshit. I tried using the ones on my pans that way and ended up making a mess of my stovetop. They are, however, indeed convenient for hanging the buggers. 3. THE LOOP ON THE BACK OF YOUR DRESS SHIRTS If you look below the collar and between the shoulders on the back of many men’s dress shirts, you may spot a little loop. Though most men probably don’t use it for its intended purpose—at least, not often—it's there to provide a convenient way to hang up the shirt when a hanger is unavailable. Whaaaa? That's what chairs are for. And as kids, we had rude names for these loops. "Fruit loop" was the least offensive of the bunch. 4. THE GLOVE COMPARTMENT More like the user manual compartment. 5. THE HOLES IN YOUR BOX OF ALUMINUM FOIL If you've ever studied a box of aluminum foil or cling wrap, you may have noticed that there are little indentations that, once pushed in, create small holes on either end of the box. Look a little closer and the reason for these holes is printed right on the box: "Press to lock roll." I used to be one of those people who would read the fine print on anything, lest I miss something important. So yeah, I knew this. But when I try to use these tabs for their intended purpose, it's a bigger pain in the ass than if I don't. 6. THE DRAWER UNDER YOUR OVEN If you keep cookie sheets, cupcake pans, and pancake griddles in that narrow little drawer under your oven, you’re in good company—so does most of the rest of the world. Because that's what it's for and I refuse to revise my knowledge to fit any so-called "facts" about it. 7. THE ADDITIONAL HOLES ON YOUR CONVERSE SNEAKERS They're talking about the air holes, but back when I had Converse sneakers, you know, when they cost like five bucks instead of 1500, I had all kinds of additional holes in them, none of which were intended by the manufacturer. 8. THE LOOP ON THE SIDE OF YOUR CARPENTER JEANS THEY'RE CARPENTER JEANS WHAT THE HELL DO YOU THINK THAT'S FOR? Also, did you notice that all of these are about holes? If I were a shrink, I'd have a field day with that. Anyway, like I said, just a bit of fun, but I can't leave this without doing my quick review of Cruella, which I saw yesterday. One-Sentence Movie Review: Cruella I probably wouldn't have appreciated this movie as much if I hadn't spent the time, earlier this week, to watch both the original Dalmatians cartoon and its live-action remake; as it is, while my expectations were fairly low, it turned out to be a fun movie about the perils of working in the cutthroat fashion industry -- and maybe a few other, minor themes like betrayal and revenge -- consequently, as much as I desperately wanted to describe the movie as "spotty" to make a really, really bad Dalmatian pun, I cannot, because it's pretty tight, just like the outfits it features. Rating: 4.5/5 (but probably more like 3.5 if you haven't seen or don't remember 101 Dalmatians) |
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