Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
Monthly Archives: January 2010
My musical Achilles’ heel
I will be the first to admit that my musical tastes are not for everyone. Even I find the Swans’ Michael Gira’s baritone to be deadly, and the best thing I can say about Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon is that she out-Courtney Loves Courtney Love. And while I can’t understand why anyone would dislike the swanging accordion riffs of Gogol Bordello, my wife and son both do, and since I love them, I’m honor-bound to concede there is a viable worldview that does not elevate GB to the level of, say, Devo, B-52s, or Talking Heads.
But I can’t take more than a half hour of country music TV. I discovered that today in the gym. Here I was doing my best to strain my back on the lat pulldown when some young buck with his trendy li’l soul patch turns the TV on to the country music station.
It’s not the music that bugs me. I know this because I’ve been in restaurants where country music plays in the background, and I don’t lose my appetite. It’s the musicians. It’s this nagging hunch I have that they’re all posers. That their cowboy hats and vocal twangs are props, and if I could see them in the privacy of their own livingrooms, I’d find them sipping sherry and speaking perfect William Powell-esque English. That if I tugged on their beards I would discover just how well Krazy Glue binds to skin.
Country music also tweaks me because it’s yet another member of the set, Things That Are Immensely Popular That I Don’t Get. Like football, for example. A couple of weeks ago, Jake and I went to a pizza parlor after our workout. While we were waiting for our pizza, we had a good thirty minutes to observe the American couch jock in one of his favored habitats: in a restaurant with beer in one hand, pizza in the other, surrounded by fellow couch jocks. I don’t understand all the yelling and hooting and whistling. If I tried to mimic the behavior, I would yell, hoot, or whistle at inappropriate times. The best I can do is exclaim “OH!” a few hundred milliseconds after everyone else reacts.
Perhaps football fans bother me because I can’t seem to work up that degree of enthusiasm over anything.
D.
Dragon Age meta
First, a hat tip to Portal:
The writing on this game rocks.
Sexuality here is pretty open-ended. Here’s a conversation between the protagonist (you) and Alistair, the future king.
Oh, and if you go to the local brothel, whatever you do, don’t tell the madame, “Surprise me.”
D.
Pride of the savannah
Last night, I dreamed I had become some sort of naturalist, a fieldworker in the African savannah, sent to a nature preserve to study lions in the wild. I was fresh off the boat and raring to go, and without any special instruction or preparation I began hiking my way across the preserve. Say what you will about me, I’m not shy.
Within a matter of minutes, I realized I had been spotted by a lion and lioness, who were heading over to greet eat me. I also realized I was dreaming, but I still didn’t relish the thought of experiencing this, even in dream land. So I hit the ground and pretended to play dead.
The two came loped over, sniffed me. And then the male mounted the female and they went at it.
One word for what followed: messy.
Interpretations, anyone?
D.
A B&W redux
I had been trying to think up a fun topic for tonight’s post when I remembered Kakabekia. Then I had the thought, “Kakabekia is such a neat story, I’ll bet I’ve done this before,” and crap, I was right! When I found my old post — one of the Thirteens — I had so much fun rereading it that I decided to post it as a redux. Hopefully y’all will have forgotten it as well as I had, all the better to re-enjoy it.
A note on the Kakabekia story: I learned about this organism in a biology class I took during med school. Early Evolution of Life, or some such. I remember I wrote a pretty cool term paper for that class, suggesting that within the genetic code of most life on earth (not all life forms share the same code, although all codes are quite similar) one could demonstrate evidence that the code itself is a product of selection. My teacher liked my term paper so much he suggested I write it up for publication, which I never did. This would have been, oh, 1988 or 1989? And guess what, on that Wikipedia page I just linked to, there’s a link to a paper published in 2003 making just that point.
I can’t tell you how many times this happened to me back in those days. I would have a great idea — perhaps something theoretical, like this genetic code bit, or perhaps something technical, like a way to fish for genes encoding promoter-binding proteins. Someone in authority would say, “Hey, good idea, get to work on it,” and I wouldn’t. There were always other things to do. My ideas were top notch, but my ambition, or perhaps my sense of perspective, insight into what was REALLY important, whatever . . . sucked.
Sorry. I didn’t mean to turn this into a kvetchfest. I was meant to be a doctor, right? Not a scientist. Or, if I was meant to be a scientist, it was only after skipping over all that dull gruntwork as a grad student or post-doc. Yup. Go straight to the finish, have my own R01 and scads of my own post-docs and grad students doing my bidding, turning my fine ideas into realities. Shame life doesn’t work that way.
Below the fold: thirteen cool microorganisms. (And, hey! It’s even Thursday!)
Just one question: where did I find time, in the old days, to write such detailed posts?
iPredict: iFlop
So Apple released the iPad today. For $499, you get an oversized iPod. I think this one’s going to belly flop because it’s the wrong size. It’s too big to fit into your pocket, too small to serve as a nice viewer for movies, TV shows, videos. (We’re big screen people, I guess.)
It's a lidless laptop!
I want something that will fit into my shirt pocket yet give me the experience of an 18 inch monitor (or better). VR goggles with internet access, perhaps. I want to be able to type, too, but that technology is with us already. There are those cool gizmos that project a keyboard onto a flat surface, so that you can type anywhere, on just about anything.
THIS cracked me up (from the Seattle Times):
Yet the iPad didn’t receive the warm welcome given the iPhone in 2007, with some pundits shrugging and others making jokes about the name, which some thought conjured up feminine-hygiene products.
Can you imagine anyone shlepping one of these things around? Other than to show off his new toy, I mean.
What new tech would you like to see? I’m still holding out for teleporters.
D.
Some day, my Nook will come
Yes, we bought a Nook. A Nook, not a Kindle, because Barnes and Noble is a blue company and Amazon is red (based on which politicians they fund), and more significantly, the Nook allows you to download free stuff from the Google Book Project / Project Gutenberg, and we like us some old books. Karen just got done reading Tarzan, Return of Tarzan, She, Return of She (am I getting those titles right? I don’t know! It’s late, I’m tired, you get the idea), and now she’s reading an Emile Zola novel. Oh, and the Nook let’s you loan out ebooks to friends.
We have a Sony ebook reader (that’s what Karen has been using to read the aforementioned books), but I dislike the dark gray text on the light gray background. I want black on white! And no, this is not simply a must-have compulsion for new gadgetry. We don’t own an iPhone. We have an iPod but we don’t use it (I won it at a supermarket, actually). I confess that when I heard about Apple’s upcoming tablet, I was intrigued, but I doubt I’ll get that, either. Knowing Apple, it’ll probably cost $4000.
Sometimes I think I should get some of this newfangled crap just to stay au courant. But then I remember that I have a Twitter account and a Facebook account that I never use. Not that I pay anything for these things, but it disturbs me sometimes to think of the fossilized footprints I’ve left on the web. Do yourself a favor and never google “angstwolf.” Some of those recipes (like the guacamole) are better off forgotten.
I’m going to bed.
D.
PS: Why do I really want a Nook? Because I’m fed up with buying books. Physical space books, that is. I have boxes and boxes of ’em and I don’t want to have even more boxes of ’em.
I need to donate.
Musical interlude
Video game music wasn’t always this good. Remember Pac Man’s tinny soundtrack? But things have come a long way since Pac Man.
For a quick eye-opener (ear-opener?), try Tin Hat Trio’s “The Longest Night,” from the game Triachnid. Then listen to Jami Sieber’s “Undercurrent” or “Maenam”, both of which you’ll hear while playing Braid. You’ll even hear “Undercurrent” backwards (Braid is a time-manipulating game), and it’s intriguingly good.
Even Civilization III had some decent music, although when you hear something ad nauseum, it still gets tiresome.
On the other hand, I can listen again and again to Portal’s “Still Alive,” the song that introduced us to Jonathan Coulton, and it never fails to make me smile. (Or maybe it was his, “Re: Your Brains.” Also good for grins.)
D.
Soft tissue is a piece of cake
It’s the inorganic world that defies me.
I’ve misplaced our mailbox key. Mind you, I’m not delighted that we have to have a key to our mailbox. Paranoid people like it, I suppose, since a key implies that no one can steal their mail. On the other hand, if you’re paranoid, you probably figure someone has already made a copy of your key, perhaps several copies, and the creepy guy who lives down the block and drives that battered Volvo is right now steaming open your American Express bill to discover just how many purchases you’ve made from Xandria this month.
So, really, I don’t understand the point of locked mailboxes.
It was a small key on a tiny ring attached to a circular, foil-rimmed, paper tag. I kept it in our Camry, in the detritus-catcher (cup holder) behind the parking brake. Sometimes I put it into the other detritus-catcher in front of the parking brake, but since Wednesday, it has been in neither place. I’ve tossed the car, twice nearly gotten my upper torso stuck in the driver’s side foot well (and, yes, it’s possible to reach the horn from there, just in case), and I am assured that the key has not fallen beneath either seat. It’s not in the crack between the seat bottom and back. It’s not in the ash tray. It’s not in the glove compartment.
I’ve checked all of my shirt and pants pockets. No go.
Today, I had the bright idea of looking into the recess from which the parking brake emerges. I could see something round, a glint of metal . . . my key, perhaps? And was this sufficient encouragement to rip apart something I would no way, no how be able to put back together? (Admittedly, I could possibly reach this object with any one of the long forceps I still own. Ripping-apart was and is an option of last resort.)
From private practice, I still have a flexible fiberoptic laryngoscope and light source. I broke it out, found an extension cord to power the light source, and went hunting. Sadly, the two round objects in the recess are (A) a washer and (B) a quarter. But I give myself points for resourcefulness.
I went to the post office, and they wanted $50 to change the lock and give us new keys. Then the woman helping me discovered that our homeowner’s association owns the boxes, so we’re out of luck for now.
I remembered that when we moved in, there were a buttload of random keys in a drawer. I was pretty sure we only had one mailbox key, but maybe, just maybe, one of those keys was a backup mailbox key. And maybe one is. I don’t know. I can’t find those damned keys anywhere.
Don’t get me started on how difficult it was to change the bathroom light bulbs.
D.
Second verse, same as the first
I’m having a hard time getting upset over today’s Supreme Court decision allowing corporations the ability to spend unlimited amounts of money to sway voters in federal and state elections. Keith Olbermann is calling this decision “our Dred Scott,” as if it’s some sort of pre-Enlightenment atavism, with the five justices writing in the majority a collection of chronologically displaced Australopithecines*. It’s the end of the world as we know it.
In reality, corporations have controlled our politics for many decades, and today’s decision merely legalizes something that has long been an institutional reality. Those like Olbermann who would bust an aneurysm over the loss of our cherished democracy are analogous to people who, upon hearing of the legalization of marijuana, would declare, “Now people might smoke it!”
Come to think of it, perhaps today’s decision will usher in a new era of realpolitik on the Court. They should legalize marijuana, do away with highway speed limits, ax jaywalking restrictions, shred all of the blue laws.
Hmm. When did I become a Libertarian?
D.
*No idea why my brain is breaking out the dictionary. No idea whatsoever.
Preparing for a talk . . .
. . . that I am giving tomorrow on tubes, tonsils, and adenoids. It’s for the pediatricians. I’m giving another talk this March for the pedis and the GPs on ENT urgencies (nosebleeds, ear trauma, laryngitis, and so forth), but this one’s all about the bread and butter.
No, not me. Too much hair.
Just looked through my slides and (A) I’m worried I don’t have two hours’ worth of material, and (B) many of my slides are too wordy. And (C), not enough pictures.
These folks are human, after all. They wants to see lots o’ pictures.
I’ll make it up to them in March.
D.