All things weird and wonderful, 28

11 01 2013

Galaxy’s centre tastes of raspberries and smells of rum, say astronomers

How is this not among the best news in, um, the galaxy?

Astronomers searching for the building blocks of life in a giant dust cloud at the heart of the Milky Way have concluded that it would taste vaguely of raspberries.

Ian Sample of the Guardian reports that after years of pointing their telescope into the nether regions of the ‘verse,

astronomers sifted through thousands of signals from Sagittarius B2, a vast dust cloud at the centre of our galaxy. While they failed to find evidence for amino acids, they did find a substance called ethyl formate, the chemical responsible for the flavour of raspberries.

“It does happen to give raspberries their flavour, but there are many other molecules that are needed to make space raspberries,” Arnaud Belloche, an astronomer at the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Bonn, told the Guardian.

Curiously, ethyl formate has another distinguishing characteristic: it also smells of rum.

I’m a gin and whisky woman, myself, but still. . . .

(Whoops, forgot to note: h/t Charlie Pierce)


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Coolsville

10 01 2013

Holy shit, I gots me some readers.

Two days ago I got this nifty email from Cherie Lucas stating that my Keep on keepin’ on post was Freshly Pressed, and I could add a banner and, um, some other stuff to spread the news.

Cool, I thought. And did nothing.

Wednesday afternoon I noted my followers had ticked up from 42 to 43, and thought, Hey, cool. I was going to write a post, then remembered a meeting at work today for which I had not prepared, and a former colleague was being sent off with some pints at a local bar, and. . . I think you know where this anecdote is going.

Anyway. After clicking through my various regular-read blogs, [Pause: Another holy shit—Supertramp on WNYC? What?! Oh, okay, just an historical snippet. Panic averted.] I thought I’d follow up on my presidents-are-assholes post with a consideration of ruthlessness and sons-of-bitches. A nice little piece, with some tasty bits from Machiavelli tossed in, a little Bueno de Mesquita and Riker, maybe some Schmitt, and appreciations for Cardinal Richelieu and Thomas Cromwell.

I think I would have been pleased with the post.

But no, I open my blog and, whoosh, 79 followers. Seventy-nine! If I could remember enough math, I could give you the percentage increase! Eight-four percent—is that right? Or maybe 88% if I start at 42 rather than 43 followers? Could be right. . . .

So: HELLOOOOOOOO!!!

I’m rarely happy about anything, but I am genuinely happy that enough of you thought enough of that last post that you decided, Eh, I could follow this.

Okay, so maybe seventy-nine isn’t that big of a deal to many folks—especially those folks with three-, four-, five-or-more-digit followers—but I ain’t nobody, so I figure that if you’re reading this, it’s because you like or are provoked enough by what I write to (sorry about this. . .) keep on, keepin’ on.

That’s nice. That’s very nice.

A coupla’ things:

1. I swear, as you may have gathered. A lot. Ever since my high school English teacher tried to nudge me out of my potty-mouthed ways by stating that swearing was Not creative, I have mostly failed in my efforts to find more creative ways to express my ire/dismay/delight/boredom. (My current favorite swear? Fucking hell!)

2. I’m not on Facebook or Twitter. No Facebook because, no. And no Twitter because, as I explained to C., I can be insanely competitive in argument, so much so that that notorious xkcd comic prompts a sigh of recognition from me (yes, I have been that person). C. thought that the short format of Twitter might work against my triumphalist tendencies, but really, consuming those little 140-character nuggets would be like tossing back so many bite-sized Snickers. No, better to abstain completely.

3. I am also insanely reactive, which, predictably, enrages me. Okay, that’s overstating it: It used to enrage me, and now I’m mostly able to take a breath, take a walk, whatever, and clear my head before actually responding to whatever it was that set me off. This is why blogging beats tweeting: I’m less likely to pop off in long form. (Tho’, for the record, I do pop off in long form; cf. Category: Rant.)

4. I like comments! So comment! I’ll respond! And argue! I love to argue! (And despite what I said, above, I’m not always or even mostly insanely competitive. So bring it!)

5. I’m shit at promoting myself*, but will happily promote others, so if you have something you want to shout about, g’head and shout about it.

(*Not because I lack an ego—whoo boy, you oughtta getta load of the size of that thing!—but, because, huh, I don’t know, I’m just no good at it. Maybe it’s due to the size of my superego. . . .)

6. I do click on your names and gravatars to see who you are and if you have a blog, I’ll read it (although I don’t always comment—hypocrite, I know). Again, since I’m not on Facebook I can’t scrawl on your wall, but since you’ve taken the time to stop by my joint, it seems only neighborly that I swing by yours. I’ve gotten to know a coupla’ folks online and even hosted one cyber-friend (hi GeekHiker!) on part of his NYC leg of his trip around the US.

And if you don’t have a blog and don’t particularly want anything from me but the occasionally-worthwhile post, that’s great. This might sound odd coming from someone who’s sending words about her life out into the ether, but I do like my privacy, too.

7. Still, if yer ever in the vicinity of Brooklyn and up for a pint, drop me an email. As I noted in an earlier post, I’m trying to move my default from No to Yes—I’m trying to move myself—so any excuse to get out of the apartment and out into the world. . . .

So, hey (two words, along with “anyway”, that I overuse), welcome.


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Listen to the music: Keep on keepin’ on

8 01 2013

I lost my groove.

I mentioned in a previous post that I am no longer a completist, that is, I no longer need to own every cd by every singer or band that I like. Five U2 cds? Enough. Six REM? Plenty. It’s not that I won’t buy any more cds of those for whom I already own multiple discs, but, y’know, the urgency has faded.

Given my former completist sensibilities, however, I do own many cds by one band/singer which, frankly, has been a problem on my quest to listen to every cd I own: I burn out on a group.

My current (cheapo) stereo allows me to load 3 discs at a time, which is just right: Enough for a solid listening section, without me wanting to cut it short. But when you’re working through your collection alphabetically, that means the Beatles are followed by the Beatles followed by the Beatles.

I like the Beatles. But, unlike in the past where I would overdose on a single group, I no longer have the patience to listen to three or six hours of the Beatles or Beck or, really, anyone. Hell, the 72-minute long Mary J. Blige cd was too long for me.

Like I said, the groove was gone.

Once it became apparent that I was avoiding listening to my cds because I didn’t want multiple all-Beck nights, I decided to switch things up. I considered just plucking cds out randomly, but I figured that the pick wouldn’t really be random and that I’d just pick cds I often listen to. No, better to continue with the alpha-step, but tweak it.

Now, when I have more than one cd by the same performer(s), I choose the first one, then pick a cd from the following groups. So I chose Beck’s Mellow Gold, then Daniel Belanger, then Belle and Sebastien’s “Tigermilk”. The next night, Beck’s Sea Change, Belle & Sebastien’s Storytelling, and Belly’s star.

Works like a charm.

A few other things. One, I really do like Belly. I like Tanya Donelly’s wordplay (On every track/I fractured every back/Thinking the point was step on every crack), and how her voice cracks on “Super-Connected”—one of the things that distinguishes pop singing from, say, operatic singing is that the flaws are an integral part of the force of the song. (Think of Merry Clayton’s break in the Stones’s “Gimme Shelter”: she’s been hauling Jagger through that wail, and when she finally breaks near the end, you know what she’s been through and what she’s put you through.)

Two, I am a puddle in the face of a good leftist rallying song. Goddamn if I didn’t tear up listening to Black 47’s “James Connelly” (Oh Lily, I don’t want to die, we’ve got so much to live for/And I know we’re all goin’ out to get slaughtered, but I just can’t take any more). I am a pinko all the way through my bitter little heart.

Three, I think this whole quest is starting to take shape. Early on I was treating this as a kind of duty; even as I claimed I wanted to see if I could recapture my connection to the music, it felt more like a test—and who likes taking tests? But I’ve gotten off my ass enough times to shimmy around the wood floor, or paused just to take in the words and the sounds that now, now it feels more like a chance.

And that’s all right.

~~~
28. Be Good Tanyas, Chinatown
29. Be Good Tanyas, hello love
30. Beach Boys, Endless Summer
31. Beatles, Revolver
32. Beatles, Abbey Road
33. Beatles, Please Please Me
34. Beatles, White Album
35. Beatles, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band
36. Beck, Odelay
37. Beck, Midnight Vultures
38. Beck, Mutations
39. Beck, Mellow Gold
40. Daniel Belange, Rever Mieux
41. Belle and Sebastien, “Tigermilk”
42. Beck, Sea Change
43. Belle and Sebastien, Storytelling
44. Beck, Guero
45. Belly, star
46. Belly, King
47. Benedictine Monks of Santo Domingo de Silos, Chant
48. Beta Band, Hot Shots II
49. Bettie Serveet, lamprey
50. Jordy Birch, Funmachine
51. Bjork, Post
52. Black 47 [eponymous ep-cd]
53. Mary J. Blige, No More Dramas


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The thrill is gone

6 01 2013

Bones should have ended awhile ago.

No, this isn’t a complaint about the eighth season—it’s like the seventh season, fine, not like the wretched sixth—but more an observation about exhaustion.

The show is tired, and that tiredness shows. The writers are practically shouting that Angela is going to leave the Jeffersonian, and the whole Cam-Aristoo thing? Hmpf.

The main problem, of course, is that Booth and Brennan have settled into domesticity with one another, and as much work-chemistry as the two had in the first five seasons, they have no home-chemistry. In fact, their lack of a home fire burning is dampening their work-mojo.

(No, I don’t hate that they’re a couple, although I would have preferred that they not be. I also think it would have been better, from a dramatic perspective, if they wanted to go with the whole Brennan-Booth-baby thing, to have had them either tried and failed to make a go as a couple, or have tried simply to figure out how to raise their kid together without the two of them getting together. But, y’know, they didn’t ask me.)

I still like all of the characters, and the plots, hey, the plots are fine, but the frisson has fizzled. There was an unpredictability in the early seasons, an unpredictability predicated in large part of the audience’s ignorance of the characters. As we got to know them, we settled into a kind of comfort with them, which is in and of itself not necessarily a problem.

But it did become one for the writers. Whereas before there was a sense of what if with the characters—a what-ifness heightened by or illuminated by the plots—now there is only a kind of here-we-go-again sensibility, i.e., the comfort with the characters’ quirks has deliquesced into laziness.

It was, I think, in reaction to the comfort that wrecked season 6:  the plots frantically tried to zap some zip back into the characters, so much so that I, as a viewer, thought, Shit, they’d never do that.

Consider the interns on an improvement kick: Clark tried to be more open, and Fischer attempted to find peace and happiness. Now, I’m not against change—trying to do a bit of that, m’self—but these attempts came out of nowhere and, more importantly, went nowhere.

And Brennan, well, Brennan they twisted around most of all, having her go back to patterns she’d dropped in the first or second season, upping her coldness factor and downplaying the curiosity that always took the edge off her clinical approach, and, worst of all, treating her emotions less as a dimension of herself with which she was not wholly comfortable than as something which occurred outside of her, afflicting her.

Example? There was an episode late in season six which involved a runaway deaf girl murder suspect. (Yeah, I know, but that’s part of the territory of police procedurals.) Brennan is just nasty to this girl, nasty in a way that she rarely was with any other suspect, and certainly more than she had ever been to any troubled kid. It took Sweets to remind Brennan of her own fraught childhood—something which never would have been necessary in the preceding (or succeeding) seasons.

Anyway, it seems in the current and last season that the producers figured out how they erred in season six, and returned us to the comfort the show had attained in season five. Clark is back to uptight, Fischer is back to dour, and while I still miss Vincent Nigel-Murray, the crew is complete.

Alas, completeness is the death of drama.

I still watch Bones, and will watch through to the end of the season. I just hope that this is the last.


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You make me feel brand new

4 01 2013

Heh.

(photo from Timeline Photos; h/t Charlie Pierce)


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A year has passed since I wrote my note

3 01 2013

You know that second novel? The one that needed just one, final, editorial swipe before I sent it out to. . . whom/wherever, never to be heard from again?

It’s been over a year since I began that one, final, editorial swipe.

Yeah.

I hauled it out of cold storage a coupla’ nights ago, and had to click around to make sure that I was working on the latest file because, y’know, it couldn’t have been since October 2011 that I last opened Home Away Home. Yeesh.

And it’s stupid, because while I’ve caught a few typos and made a few minor revisions here and there, there are only 2-4 spots where major revisions are required, and each of those 2-4 spots is maybe 1000, 1500 words long.

Now, those spots are crucial dialogues—the plausibility of the plot can be said to hang on believability that first dialogue, and the reader’s sense of the characters requires that the other dialogues sound like they’re coming from the characters and not from, well, me—but MAN, holding up a 152,000-word manuscript because I can’t shake loose 5000 good words?

Damn.

So that’s what I’ve been doing—not, y’know, panning for those 5000 words, but checking over the other 147,000 words to make sure that those, at least, are settled. Then I’ll hunker down with those last bits and sift and swirl and go round and round until I find the pieces that fit, until everything fits.

I’ll be damned if that takes me another year.


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The sweetness follows

31 12 2012

Merry happy peaceful.

040

Still here, still on the way.

May where you are be as maddening and exhilarating as you desire.

May your desires confound and delight you and carry you away and bring you to where you need to be.

May we all be where and how and who we need to be.

With kisses.


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They say what’s up with him

31 12 2012

Presidents are assholes.

Too strong? Misleading, perhaps.

Allow me to clarify: asshole has come to mean something akin to douche or dick—I’ve used in that way when I’ve lamented my own assholish behavior—but there’s an older meaning, closer to prick, which might be captured by the phrase “arrogant asshole”, i.e., someone who thinks he’s all that, the one who’s better than everyone else.

I like President Obama, like seeing the pictures of him with his kids (or with anyone’s kids) or constituents, and there have been moments of his presidency in which I pumped my fist and hissed yes!

But I still think he’s an asshole.

How could he be anything but? He’s the most powerful person in the most powerful country in the world, performing an impossible job, with the only opportunities to be someone other than president tucked into those moments likes cracks in the wall of presidential responsibility. He has to be on, or ready to be on, at all times. He is never not the president.

Who else but an asshole could be president?

To believe that this is a job you could do, and do well, requires a scary level of self-confidence, the kind of calm self-regard that may—may—allow you to second-guess yourself, but only if it confirms your actions or moves you forward. You don’t look back, you don’t wonder what if; you make up your mind, and you do.

Because you’re the fucking president of the fucking Yoo-nited States, and if you can’t do it it can’t be done.

Remember when George W. Bush was asked about his mistakes, and he couldn’t really think of one? Or Bill Clinton’s refusal to admit his fling with Monica Lewinsky and his churlish apology for both the behavior and the lies? They were both so obviously and ridiculously wrong to any normal person—who doesn’t make mistakes? who does that hound dog think he’s fooling?—but normal people do not become president.

I saw a clip the other day of a Barbara Walters interview with the President and Michelle Obama, and there was some bit that Michelle was funnier. The president said, yes, Michelle is funny, but “I’m funnier than people think.”

Asshole. You’re the fucking president of the fucking Yoo-nited States, and you can’t let this one slide?

The president is rather famously competitive—the first lady noted elsewhere in the interview that she doesn’t like to play Scrabble with him because he’s “a little irritating when he wins”—so it’s hardly surprising that he’s going to want to be in it no matter what, but, jeez, man, let it go.

Except, of course, that presidents really can’t let things go. You run for president because you believe that you can catch the things the others let go, and we, the American people, vote for you because we expect you to catch those things and, occasionally, to sling it back out and past everyone else. You expect to win, and we expect you to win.

Is this a fault of the people who run for president, or of the people who vote for him? Both, probably, but even more to the point is the fact that the job is impossible. It is impossible to be president, and yet someone is, nonetheless.

You’d have to be some kind of arrogant asshole to believe you could do the impossible.


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I pick up the phone and go Execute

27 12 2012

Are we always already cyborgs?

Sorry for the Heideggerianism, but it’s tough to talk about ontology and technology without bringing in the Nazi Gasbag, specifically, his Question Concerning Technology and, for that matter, Letter on Humanism.

What’s set off this spasm of speculation? A bit in Crooked Timber on a piece by Noah Smith about cyborg techs. Chris Bertram was snarking on economists in his bit, but the, um, question concerning (cyber) technology is taken up with some vigor in the comments.

One question, of course, is the one ol’ Marty throws at us: what is it to be a cyber-human? Can one even be a cyber-human? He, the master of despair, would say No:

In truth. . . precisely nowhere does many today any longer encounter himself, i.e., his essence. Man stands so decisively in attendance on the challenging forth of enframing that he does not grasp the enframing as a a claim, that he fails to see himself as the one spoken to, and hence also fails in every way to hear in what respect he ek-sists, from out of his essence, in the realm of an exhortation or address, that he can never encounter only himself.

As I paraphrased this elsewhere (okay, my dissertation), “There can be no peaceful coexistence between technology and humans because the ways of technology, in the course of enframing humans, prevent them from being fully human.”

This drives Heidegger over the edge: “We have only purely technological conditions left. It is no longer an earth on which human beings live today.”

To which I responded, more or less, Bosh.

Heidegger’s concept of enframing helps us to see how caught up we are already in a techno-scientific world, that we are not separate from the technologies we create and use, and, as such, are shaped by the techs themselves. But as acute as Heidegger was in diagnosing technoscience, his prognostic skills for humans were warped by his own, ah, idiosyncratic understanding of history, and rather complete misunderstanding of actual humans.

And even the acuity of his diagnosis is marred by its partiality, that is, that he treats technological practices as somehow more forbidding and final than every other social practice that ever existed before.  In other words, he gets the transformational powers of technology, but in assigning the power to the techs rather than to the nexus of social practices which produce them (although he does go forward from the techs to the practices they produce) he misses the continuing human presence in the tech practices themselves.

This line of thinking leads rather easily to Foucault and his much-quoted bit—“My point is not that everything is bad, but that everything is dangerous, which is not exactly the same as bad. If everything is dangerous, then we already have something to do”—as well as to Donna Haraway’s admonition that “We cannot pretend we live on some other planet where the cyborg was never spat out of the womb-brain of its war-besotted parents. . . . Unlike the hopes of Frankenstein’s monster, the cyborg does not expect its father to save it through a restoration of the garden.”

In other words, this is how we are, and how we are today is as human as we want to be.

Two further points: One (and this was going to be the main point of this point until I sidetracked myself, and hm, maybe I really should make that a separate post), the real excitement about cyber-techs is about the dream of control—and it is the dream, not the tech, that is the worry.

A précis for that separate post:  A computer, its parts and software can all be patented and their use, to some extent, controlled, but what we think when we’re away from the computers remains with us, is beyond the control of any owners or managers. I don’t know if implants would make us more productive, but they would certainly make us more manageable.*

The concern, I’d argue, lies more with the management than the implant.

*Note: This is not necessarily an argument against all implants, and the speculative future post will dig around the nuances of cyber-techs and practices, but, y’know: précis.

Two, it’s not at all clear that we much care how human we are or could be.

Heidegger bemoaned the concealing power of techs—to do is not to think—but it’s doubtful than many people in the history of people have ever spent much time pondering being. Maybe cyber-techs will hide us irrevocably from ourselves, but it’s also just possible that in thinking about how we incorporate these techs into ourselves, we’ll wonder not just about the techs, but about us.

I doubt it, but what the hell: one can always hack the hack.


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Ring the bells that can still ring

24 12 2012

Merry happy peaceful, by way of Leonard Cohen:

Anthem

The birds they sang
at the break of day
Start again
I heard them say
Don’t dwell on what
has passed away
or what is yet to be.

Ah the wars they will
be fought again
The holy dove
She will be caught again
bought and sold
and bought again
the dove is never free.

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in.

We asked for signs
the signs were sent:
the birth betrayed
the marriage spent
Yeah the widowhood
of every government —
signs for all to see.

I can’t run no more
with that lawless crowd
while the killers in high places
say their prayers out loud.
But they’ve summoned, they’ve summoned up
a thundercloud
and they’re going to hear from me.

Ring the bells that still can ring …

You can add up the parts
but you won’t have the sum
You can strike up the march,
there is no drum
Every heart, every heart
to love will come
but like a refugee.

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in.

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in.
That’s how the light gets in.
That’s how the light gets in.


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