It's a well-known fact that great ideas often occur on the shitter. Measuring mass by water displacement, Ohm's law, the flux capacitor... the list goes on and on. Today, I had a great idea on the shitter, after having one of those times where there is a hell of a lot of effort for a very small output. "Much Ado About Nothing" popped into my head, and I quickly realized that Shakespeare has provided us with a wealth of terminology for different types of shit experiences:

• As You Like It (your favorite kind)
  
• The Two Gentlemen of Verona or The Two Noble Kinsmen (two homogenous portions)
  
• Venus and Adonis, or Troilus and Cressida, or Antony and Cleopatra (two contrasting portions)
  
• The Phoenix and the Turtle (two wildly contrasting portions, one of which floats and one which took forever)
  
• The Tempest (rough seas)
  
• The Taming of the Shrew (an epic battle)
  
• All's Well That Ends Well (eventual victory)
  
• Henry VI part 1
  
• Henry VI part 2
  
• Henry VI part 3 (a three-stage hungover morning's worth)
  
• A Comedy of Errors (I've never experienced this one, but I've seen it in some gas stations; as is often the case with comedies, there is an underlying tragic nature to these ones)
  

Well, sorry to break a seven-month blog silence like this. I guess since so much of the writing I do is on the level of figurative bull's shit, I just wanted to tackle some literal human's shit.

Is this what wisdom smells like?

• In certain cultures, hunger is personified as a wolf. When you get just a little bit hungry, then eat, it is like you ate the little baby wolf. How could you do it. If you get moderately hungry, you then kill the hunger by eating the adolescent wolf, a better adversary. But if you get really really hungry, then the wolf grows stronger. Too strong. Now the wolf is invincible no matter what you eat to kill it. Then you have no choice but to call upon the deity known as the Crazy Hunger, who alone is capable of dispatching this terrible wolf-beast. You set up a massive feast, I mean we're talkin' a competitive eating type of setup here, just neverending let's say hot dogs and apple pies, and you get down on your knees, and you shake your fists and call out to the heavens, 'Crazy Hunger, EAT THIS WOLF!"
  
• I noticed I waste a lot of time worrying about things that actually turn out to be just the problems I was worrying about. Like, e.g., waking up thinking about how later on I will have to pay some bills and find something to eat and figure out what to teach some kid on the piano. But this is such a stupid thing to worry about, because whether or not I worry, I'm still gonna pay those bills, find something to eat, and figure out what to teach some kid on the piano. So I was thinking what are better things to worry about. Of course the saints among us can probably worry about something unrelated to themselves, like global warming or hunger or that sort of thing. I tried that and it doesn't do the trick. Don't get me wrong, I care about those things, but I can't get myself to wake up too early worrying about them. I need some self-interest in there. So my new plan is instead of worrying about the inevitable and inescapable knots and obstacles of the everyday, I will start worrying about what to do in unlikely situations. Like for instance, say you were falling from a blown-up airplane towards the sea from not all that huge a distance. I figure if you are able to streamline your body into a perfect dive, you might not break all your bones and die when you hit. Or how about if you hear a nuclear explosion but it is a good ways off and you have like ten seconds to get somewhere safe from the shockwave, where are you gonna go? Or say someone wants to mug you, what sort of things are you gonna do to make them think you're too crazy to fuck with? Or what if someone decides to interview you about something you did, what are you gonna say to not sound like an idiot? What if you are driving across a bridge and there is an earthquake and you have to decide in like two seconds whether to try to slam on the brakes or accelerate enough to jump the newly formed gap in the middle of the bridge? These are the sorts of unlikely but possible scenarios that I want to waste my worrying energy on from here on out.
  
• Every single time I ever get annoyed with someone, and I mean EVERY single time, I then realize it is really something about myself I see in the someone. This goes for cats too.
  
• I taught a kid to play the drums. I am a dude who taught a kid to play the drums. If I didn't teach him, well, probably someone else would have. But still.
  
• Little kids like Buster Keaton because people falling is still the funniest thing.
  
• It turns out it is really easy to make delicious mustard at home with nothing but mustard seeds and water, and probably you want some vinegar or white wine too.
  
• It ain't no Hubble deep field, but when you look in ordinary binoculars, you are fucking looking back in time. I mean, not much, just a tiny little infinitesimal micro-nano-mini-second, but still.
  
• Our understanding of the things and relationships in our world can be favorably compared to the Hubble deep field. For one thing, we only see shit if we look really close at a spot. For another, things look 2D unless we use our brains and more evidence (like, say, the red shift caused by the electromagnetic radiation doppler effect from galaxies receding from us at varying rates) to figure out how they fit together in 3 d's. There's always gonna be more to understand the closer you look, and you're still gonna be wrong from the perspective of the dude in the future who gets a better look.
  
• You should google up some info on the Hubble deep field, I decided it is kind of ridiculous to link to general information like that in a blog post.
  
• If you're naturally curious, the internet makes you smarter.
  
• The most normal person you know is completely fucking weird as HELL.
  
• Keep your eyes on CERN, they are gonna discover some shit that will blow all our minds, even though it is just the shit that everything is made out of. Which fact itself blows my mind.
  
• I guess not all of these count as wisdom.
  
• I guess potentially none of these count as wisdom.
  
• Just because you're older doesn't mean you're wiser.
  
• It's not up to you whether what you say is wise anyhow.
  
• Just because you put things in topical bullet points doesn't mean they follow any sort of organizational pattern beyond the visual.
  
• Good bye.

Fun with anagrams

I saw that movie The Vanished a few days back, and like a week or two before that, Shutter Island, and then maybe a couple years ago Memento, all of which got me thinking about anagrams in the back of my mind somewhere, I guess, cuz then lo and behold the other day my mind went blank for a while, then when I came to I realized that "saint" and "isn't a" are anagrams, and then I did this thing you always have to do in music theory where you find the different "rotations" of a series of notes, resulting in something like this (only scrawled out in the sort of messy writing indicative of a crackpot revelation in progress):

isn't a saint
(sntasainti)
(ntasaintis)
(tasaintisn)
as ain't isn't
saint isn't a
ain't isn't as
in 'tisn't as a
(ntisntasai)
(tisntasain)
isn't a saint


Then I thought it would be cool to make a poem where you had to use all the five letters before you reused them, but I had to sort of cheat, and it looked like this:

saint isn't a saint
-but-
saint ain't isn't as saint isn't
-so-
ain't a saint a saint?


I dunno, it seemed worthwhile at the time but now it seems like Matty ran out of crosswords and the internet was broke.

A point about baseball and money I think it is important to keep in mind in these boring times

Yes, it is boring and predictable that the Yankees, what with their payroll about a third larger than that of the next biggest payroll in the mlb and closer to double their NL rival this year (according to this), won the World Series. We have all heard it before, about buying a championship team. And listen, I hate the Yankees as much as the next guy. I felt almost physically sick when they were talking about A-Rod's and Texeira's first rings like the endpoint of a great hero's journey instead of the result of playing on shitty teams for a few more million until now.

BUT, I submit to you the following counter-arguments before you point your hate the wrong way:

• Spending money is American. That is the American way. The Yankees wouldn't make all that money in the first place if they weren't putting out a great product, both on and off the field. Sure they live in a giant metropolis, but I'd be interested to find out how much of their income doesn't filter in from the immediate area. They have I guess what people call a "brand." That is American. Baseball is American. Capitalism is American.
  
• So-called "small-market" teams (don't know about you, but I would love to be the guy with the biggest take of the Florida Marlins' 36 million) still make a SHIT TON of money. Where does the majority of that money go? In the owners' pockets. Every time you go to these annoying new stadiums, with their mall-like interiors and their $10 beers, most of your money is going into the owners' pockets. Every owner in the mlb is making all kinds of money. But guess what? Some owners don't give a flying fuck if their team does well (see the Chicago Cubs up til recently) and some do. Some owners, like some players, will take a couple million less to put more money into building a better product. Don't think for a second the Yankees wouldn't pull in just as much dough if they came in second, and then more of the dough could go to the owners' pockets. But instead they go out and buy the best team in baseball. That is American. That is baseball.
  
• Amid all the talk of Pay-Rod and stuff, it's easy to forget about some long-time Yankees like Andy Pettite or Mariano Rivera. Those guys are old-school, man, playing for the same team for so long. Pettite's salary isn't even all that ridiculous. Almost any player in the mlb will tell you they want to play for a contender, and therefore the Yankees are easily the most desirable team for the players, since they know every single year the front office is going to do everything possible to win.
  

So, I guess what I'm trying to say is, ya, I hate the Yankees, but also I am pissed at every other team for not spending more dough. You know they got it. There's no such thing as an underdog, just owners who don't care enough to make a mil or so less. And I guess that, too, is pretty American. That's baseball.

Recent revelations and sub-revelations

• Adults shouldn't have to say words like "panini," "sammy," or "yummy."
  
• If you think you're good enough, maybe you'll be just that. If you think you aren't, maybe you can be great.
  • Here are the particular memories which have led me to this startling conclusion:
    • When I tried out for the track team in 10th grade I was sprinting, and then suddenly for the first time ever asked myself if I could go any faster, and found out that I could, a lot.
    • When I was in 4th or so grade I was in music class and was singing along all bored when I realized by controlling my throat and mouth I could actually sing the actual pitches I had theretofore falsely imaginined myself to be singing.
• Somehow every previous time I listened to Bach's St. Matthew's Passion I just thought it was "pretty good."
  • Bach, as I have recently been told, as paraphrased by me, said writing invertible counterpoint was easy-- he would just talk to God and write down the conversation.
    • Bob Uecker, on the other hand, said catching a knuckleball is easy-- all you have to do is wait until it stops rolling and pick it up.
    • Charlie Lau, on the other other hand, said there were two theories on hitting the knuckleball, but unfortunately neither of them works.
• Doing the dishes is actually pretty easy, plus then you have something clean to put your food on.
  • Example: eggs.
• The right music, editing, and narration can make you feel sorry for planemos that have been kicked out of their solar systems by gravitational conflicts.
  • "...They're by themselves" -- a real honest-to-God scientist, not some wistful poet.
  
  

Tiny Fractal Tuba: Science Fact or Science Fiction?

Hey, look, I'm not one of those dudes who's all into fractals as a Thing. I mean, you're not gonna see me hangin' around in like a fractal shirt and you're not gonna hear me talkin' about how if we could understand fractals we could like solve hunger and racism and probably travel to distant reaches of space besides.

Figure 12: I'm not this guy

But check it out: have you heard about fractal antennas*? It is so cool. They can make antennas with a ton of surface area but still tiny, because all the surface area is from all the little tiny details instead of in broad lines, you know? Shit, there's probably one in your cell phone! Believe it.

Figure 12: Believe it

Well anyhow I was thinking: why can't we use this technology to make a tiny tuba? It could have a pretty small tube, diameter-wise, but one that is just outrageously long, but you know, long from being all bent around into outlandish, somewhat psychedelic shapes that are produced from the same kind of self-similarity iteration type processes as those t-shirt patterns.

It would make such a low sound, but yet it would fit in the palm of your hand. (If your spine isn't tingling right now, either you don't care about the inconvenient size of the commercially available tubas of the day, or you maybe have some sort of neural problem you maybe should get checked out). I'm serious. This could change everything.

Scientists! Metallurgists! Help me! Now we make our millions! This is the dream that John Phillip Sousa never even knew he had!

Figure 12: Every Single Music Video in the History of the Genre was Leading Up to This Moment, But Still, Imagine it With Four Tiny Fractal Tubas

*I dare you to tell me I should say antennae. I fuckin' DARE you.

Two (2) revelations about the future

1. In the future, it is no longer up to you whether what you've just said is or isn't a joke.

2. The future is now.


Corollary 1-9A: We don't have to think stuff like Shakespeare comedies or 'I Love Lucy' are funny now. It's ok not to laugh.

Corollary 12: This kid made the funniest joke, and he didn't even know it.

I had the following revelation

Just out of nowhere it popped into my head: Kermit the frog must have been riding fixed gear in that scene in the first Muppet Movie where he's biking through the park (damn you youtube for not having it). That way the pedals would keep going and his feet would go up and down with them, so it would look like he was pedalling, even though he is not an alive animal but a puppet.

Figure 12: This bike is unusual

Of course this is the internet and so like 1000 people have already had this same revelation.

I had a political idea

I usually don't get too caught up in political stuff. But lately I have been a little bit more. I guess cuz it's everywhere. But check it out, I got this cool idea. I hear all this talk about Palin, about what the hell is the idea with her, and I figured something out-- Palin is there to triangulate Obama. I mean, experience-wise. On the one hand, you got the wisened elder McCain who obviously knows everything since he's like 99 years old and has been doing politics and army stuff since he was like 7. Then you got Palin who obviously knows nothing since she was just like the secretary of the Alaska PTA or whatever. In the middle is Obama, who like had experience once but never inhaled, or maybe whose experience is like the Canadian girlfriend he said he got to second base with or something.

Point being, this way the republican ticket has Obama surrounded. When Obama seems like he is bringing hard "beginner's mind" "non-Washington" kind of game, they can hold up their even more beginnerish, even more non-Washington Palin to cash in. But then when Obama tries to bring a more experience-havin' game, they hold up McCain and his eyebrows which have seen it all before. By circumscribing Obama on either side, they can try to locate him just where they want to, public opinion-wise.

It is like Obama used to be a point, and so did McCain, and you could draw a line through both points, and it would be a straight line. Let's call it line segment OM. As long as that was the line segment, it was kind of an either/or, more/less kind of reasoning that could separate the two on any issue. Especially experience, which seemed so big there for a while, until the republicans started noticing nobody cared as much whether Obama had been in the senate for like four Strom Thurmonds (the new unit of Washington age) or not.

Well so then they put in Palin, and so now we have a line segment POM, and now we can make a more exact judgment of who is closer to who. Which line segment is shorter, PO or OM? That is what I am talkin'. Geometry. Political geometry. Can you major in that? I wanna go back to school and major in political geometry. I got a compass and everything. Good bye.

P.S. There was a test today in class, so no Mr. Fuji. But don't worry cuz I got the next two planned out and they are gonna cause you to have one single chuckle, EACH.

Ancho is the new Chipotle

Tell your friends.

pringles salt and vinegar chips are holding back on me and also on you

I figured it out about them. They have researchers, you know, and they have discovered how to create the full spectrum of salt and vinegar flavor, and how to get it off the chip and into you. But then after they discovered the full spectrum of salt and vinegar flavor, they made their chips so that they are missing a little part of it. Like 15%, somewhere in the middle. They must have done tests, and they must have found that if they took off any more it just wouldn't taste like a salt and vinegar flavored chip, but if they took off any less then you could just eat a few salt and vinegar chips and be satisfied. But as it is that missing 15% makes you keep eating the pringles salt and vinegar chips, searching for that missing little bit of salt and vinegar bandwidth in the spectrum of salt and vinegar flavor. For real.

(I think how they do flavor is like how they compress and maximize pop songs so every single frequency is always maxed out. That is how macaroni and cheese is always available in new, now cheesier flavors. That is why Mr. Pibb was able to change into Pibb Xtra (as hinted at by changing "extra" to "xtra").

Did you know...
-In England they refer to the spectrum of salt and vinegar flavor as the spectrum of salt and vinegar flavour??
-Mr. Pibb has a Ph.D., but Dr. Pepper only has an M.A.? (plus it is in comparative literature)?
-Vinegar already has some salt in it?

the metaphors we live next to

There's this book about metaphors called Metaphors We Live By. It talks about how we use stuff like the concepts of up/down or in front of/behind to describe stuff where those concepts don't literally apply. It says we use them so systematically that it seems like our brains just work that way. Like time, say-- we're pretty consistent when we describe some scheduled event as "coming up," or that golden oldie we heard on the radio taking us "way back." You see how it works. Nothing too philosphical or complicated there.


I heard some radio program about data compression. I was thinking about the kind called run-length encoding, in which strings of data that are repeated are replaced by some stand-in to save space. Like say you took the book of Genesis and said *="and it was good." That would save you a lot of room, because after all that stuff He makes, all He would say was *. You see how it works.


Well, then I was thinking how similar that kind of idea is to the way some people say we use metaphors. By thinking of different kinds of things using the same schemas, like using the in front of/behind schema for a road and for a calendar, maybe we are saving space in our brains. Not just saving space, but keeping things more organized and less redundant. So there it was, my first crackpot revelation of 2008: Data Compression is the new Metaphor.


I looked it up to make sure nobody had beaten me to the punch. Turns out people way smarter than me have been thinking about it since the late seventies. God damn, It's hard these days to come up with a brand new crackpot revelation.


So Saturday night I was talking to a stranger about how her cell phone won't break when she drops it. I said she had to drop it harder. I thought it would be funny to understand her as wanting to break her phone. I said "gravity is not enough." That sounded like a cool catchphrase. I was overheard, but incorrectly, by a short man who plays the pedal steel guitar. He thought I said "gravity is not a metaphor." That sounded like a cool catchphrase.



The discussion turned to the pinball machine against the wall. It was called "Night Moves." We wondered whether "Night Moves" the pinball machine might be named after "Night Moves" the Bob Seger song. I suggested that in "Night Moves" the Bob Seger song, Bob Seger is actually using sex as a metaphor for pinball. I thought it would be funny to say that.



Later I realized that although so many things are used as metaphors for sex, it's all but impossible to use sex as a metaphor for anything.


Go ahead, try it.

the flow of meaning

Yesterday I hit upon a new high horse to ride in my ongoing battle against my favorite straw man, the academic music critic. I had been feeling uneasy about dissecting Morton Feldman's 2nd string quartet-- whether I had any right to "decode" it a particular way, why anyone should care how I hear it, whether it mattered what the performers or Feldman himself thought-- the usual fears of a grad student (honestly, go ask some, we are pathetic). I thought to myself, this music spews out an inexhaustible flow of meaning. Things keep happening, and new ways to make sense of them keep arising, each sense-making strategy working for some amount of time before being frustrated and receding, possibly to rise again later on. How can I put a stopper in this flow of meaning and talk about how the music means at any point?

That's when it hit me that I, like my straw man critic, was approaching the problem the wrong way. I don't have to stop up the flow of meaning in order to describe it. Instead, I can talk about how meaning arises, how it moves, what shapes it takes, what currents flow through it, where it penetrates, how deep it is. I can describe meaning in the act of meaning.



But isn't that solipsistic? How something means to two different people is just as different as what something means, isn't it?


Hell no. How something means to someone is a much more accountable notion than what something means to someone. When you're talking what, you get into all those "What this song means to me is..." sorts of situations, you get some obstinate refusal to exit subjective experience, you get all these "I hear it like this" kind of things, and they can get heated. Eventually some consensus is reached, a solid dam is built up in the flow of meaning, and often a small village or huge city is erected around the ensuing lake of meaning. Of course, those damn lakes, those damn damn lakes, they can get a bit stagnant, their beds aren't the kind that've been shaped by water for eons, they don't move in any unpredictable ways after they stabilize, and of course, you can't drive your boat through the damned damn.



My straw man is asked what something means, and as an answer he gives a damn. I don't give a damn. I don't want to stop up that flow of meaning. I want to catch it in the act of meaning. I want to describe it as meaning arises. I want to talk about the means of it's meaning. And that's a more objective pursuit. If you want to talk about the means of something's meaning, you need to talk about that something in a lot of detail, you have to describe with nuance how the actions and aspects of that something give rise to a flow of meaning, then to look at that flow of meaning, and to see if there are patterns, ways it tends to go, currents and counter-currents. But shit, no need to stop it up and make a stagnant puddle. Gotta leave it open. Like instead of a damn, maybe a giant, thinly latticed net that lets everything through, but whose ropes are sensitive to the vital stats of each subsection of the flowing river of meaning. So you get an idea how it moves, instead of stopping it up just so you can say more certainly what it is.


That's all.

The Internets

I was thinking about these internets. They are getting huge. I mean huge. Doesn't it blow your mind? I don't want to sound like an old man or something, but holy shit everybody.



Yesterday, that person who comes by six days a week to put a bunch of trash in a little slot in my door brought us the yellow pages too. Yellow pages? Wow, remember that? That was a different time. Now, again, I know I'm starting to sound like an old man here, but let me explain. What has been blowing my mind about the internet has a lot to do with those yellow pages.

I'm sure I'm the millionth person to have this revelation, but the hugeness of the internets has changed how we find information. The search is what I'm talkin' about. Yellow pages? You know how long they'd have to be to cover every subject on the internet, even to list just the top few sites for any subject? You said it. Long as shit.

There are a few ready-built reactions to this. One can be amazed and stand in awe of this information superhighway, or one can decry the internet as some sort of lowest-common-denominator cesspool, which, after all, is probably built and maintained for the most part by people procrastinating doing something else. One can see it as a way forward for liberty and freedom, or one can see it as the beginnings of a Big Brother sort of thing. I figure whichever way you look at it, you gotta admit it is a giant world of culture, of cultural information and cultural traces, maybe cultural trash at times, maybe more the leftovers and refuse of culture, but culture nonetheless. And I for one am someone who takes culture seriously, wherever I find it. So when I think about how huge these internets are, and I realize that it's all culture on there, it tends to blow my mind.


It's vast and confusing and complicated out there in that "series of tubes." Too intricate for something like a yellow pages to be of much use. That's why searching has gotten better and better. But even just searching isn't quite enough in this huge, huge world. Searching can tend to be either too directed (do you really trust those top few ad-type hits on a given search?) or too neutral (i.e. unpredictable) with regards to quality or taste for lots of people. Enter all these "social bookmarking" kind of business, enter thousands of people writing blogs, etc. Now you can search the searchers, so to speak. Find ones you agree with, or disagree with, or sometimes agree with, but ones you can get to know and trust. Like a good music reviewer who you don't always agree with but who writes with enough personal opinion that you can get an idea how you would feel about the record from how they feel about it.


Hey, man, sure this is all trite. But I don't care, because these internets are huge, my friends, they are gigantic, and they blow my mind. I mean, they blow my mind without my having to notice anything about them other than what is plainly there, without looking too close or thinking too hard.