Perfect Sounds...

I have been thinking of what my favorite songs would be if I had to make some type of playlist. When looking at my i-pod, I realized that the top 25 most played songs are not necessarily the songs I envision as sonic perfection. Of course I end up with "Hair" by Cowsills near the top and I can't quite explain it. 


Taking a cue from some other things I have strolled across recently, I decided to list somethings I am damned grateful. Today, I am grateful that I got the chance to hear this song live.


"Diamond Sea," by Sonic Youth.

My first live exposure to Sonic Youth was in the Memorial Colosseum in 1995 when they were the opening act for the nearly aborted REM Monster Tour. The drummer for REM has suffered an aneurysm a few months before, the tour was almost scrapped. I got some of the very last tickets on sale and sat in the high elevation seats wondering whether it was worth it. 

Something about this song makes me calm. Maybe it's the ten-plus minutes of droning ending with a crash of feedback; a punctuated pause of how we all want to react to the mundane.  Or maybe I get lost in the lyrics. 

I could try to explain it but it really doesn't come out in words. I have deleted this damned post three times before deciding that this song just makes my head melt and my heart kind of drift a little. 

Ride the Bronze Buffalo: Ride the Exalted Ruler

The elk is a majestic beast. There is no better animal to represent the Pacific Northwest than this massive animal...

And continuing a long absent started tradition on this blog: I present "Ride the Bronze Elk."

There are probably a bunch of people who mightfind meclimbing on a bronze statue a little disrespectful, but we truly do love the Elk.

For the elk provides us with jerky. And everyone loves jerky.

Other things considered, I probably could have done something more productive with my day after Thanksgiving. But when you conquer a statue, you find some form of reward.

So once again the offer stands, if you have a photograph of you riding a bronze statue of an animal, please send it to me. I will post it on the page. You will be memorialized on the Ride the Bronze Buffalo page.

Philosophy and Idleness

Image via Wikipedia

Minoring in ethics and having studied philosophy many educational lifetimes ago, I find myself pondering some of the greater conundrums of the world. For example:

If Bertrand Russell decided to be a wrestler, would he have chosen the name Bertrand the Muscle? As a wrestler would his finishing move be called The Bertrand Tussle? 

Many people consider Nietzsche to be a genius; those same people often attribute his genius to his insanity. Nietzsche's insanity was caused by a case of untreated syphilis. Ergo, to attain genius, one must contract syphilis.

Why is the phrase "Kant predicted the existence of Uranus, " always funny despite being a statement of fact?

Why We Should All Fear Birds

If you are a frequenter of the world of old saturday morning cartoons, the SuperFriends were probably part of your weekend morning rituals. They were part of mine. One of my first memories was an odd episode of a later incarnation of the television show, where Darkseid is the primary villain and Superman dies. 

But why the hell did I post a five-minute You-Tube video of the Green Lantern, on my World of Clutter? Because I come to give you a grave warning about alien princesses, magno-beams, birds, and headgear.

Hal Jordan, while everyone thinks he is the greatest of all Lanterns, has a problem that needs to be addressed.  Of course there is the possession by the embodiment of fear, the classic weakness to yellow,  bad hair, and general douche-baggery--but this is a much more ominous ever present peril.

Birds.

Yes, birds.

Just watch the damned video. It's worth it. I laughed for a few minutes. And I return to it every few minutes to laugh some more.

Perfection...

Perfection...

That is about all I can say about this picture of a jackalope. 

Now I am going to listen to Boston and hoist a giant a middle finger to the rest of society for the evening.

November Idleness Continuing...

Upward and they like to say. Though, I have never quite figure out who they actually were.

I decided that I should try to come up with a list of information that I should pass down as tried and true wisdom for future generations. I like to think of it as part Thus Spake Zarathustra, part Grocery List, part road map to the future. Confusing? Well, think of it like a million points of light, but less pointy and considerably more illuminated. Let's call it in the Dozenish Aura of Illumitations.

Here is the list thus far:

• Don't shave when your angry.
• Connie Chung is not a real form of martial arts.
• Its always fine to cry into your coffee, but if you cry into your tea...then you're just a pussy.
• When in Turkey try a Turkish Bath.
• When trying to impress a date with your record collection, don't play the Chariots of Fire Soundtrack.
• Say something absurd twice a day, or four times to a person who just won't get it any way.
• Implant an ABBA song in someone's head just to be evil.
• Ponder religious queries: How many pins can you stick into the head of a dancing angel?
• Wash, rinse, retreat.

Yep

I have more formally decided that November shall forever be known as a month for idle thinking. Why choose such an arbitrary month as November? Well, think of the following things:

• The eleventh month, written numerically (11th), is vaguely reminiscent of the word "Idle," which when you take an "I" and an "l" and place them next to each other, creates the number eleven.
• Jesus had eleven toes.
• When you write the date 11/11 as in the Eleventh day of November it looks like you are taking a tally of the number of times someone does something incredibly annoying. Truly, this cannot be a coincidence.
  

So filled with this knowledge, I have modeled my month around idle thinking. Well, more so than I had been doing before.  Who knows what interesting things will ensue.

Ergo, I present assorted fish heads.

A Parallax View

So what makes a good super-hero turn evil?
Readers of the Green Lantern have tried to answer this question for ages. At one time, traumatic shock ensued after the loss of millions of lives when his hometown was destroyed by a an evil alien despot. Some believed his evil was a seed of his innate arrogance. And then a giant yellow alien bug came by and it all made sense to the comic reading public.

Thank you Mr. Johns.

But I really think that crept into the essence of super heroics when they are given bad haircuts. In this case, Hal Jordan has the evilest of all hair styles, the Mullet. Yes, the mullet is cliche, it is really the first hallmark of this character's demise. Of course people will say that the gray hair was a sign of Parallax, but I posit that the mullet drew evil to him. And like most people with bad hair, he has tried to shape the world to his own warped view.

If you are looking for a more contemporary example of bad hair and comic book characters, just consider  Norman Osborn. He has probably the worst hair in all of comics, strange striped ridges that has only occurred once in nature...and he is currently trying to reshape the world in his own warped image.

Be affraid.

On Recycling...

My Chemistry class had a project due in about a week on the topic of recycling and I thought that I should do something innovative, something ground breaking, something beyond the scope of normalcy that everyone will be shocked and awed by how shockingly awesome it is.


Thus my class project:


The Mercury Recycling Project for the Portland Area:


The new long-lasting compact fluorescent bulbs have become a troublesome blessing to the environmentally concerned individuals of this city.  On one hand people want to conserve energy, on the other the mercury in the ballast of the bulb is a grave hazard to the environment. The bulbs cannot be disposed the way a normal incandescent is tossed away,  And who wants a house cluttered with toxic burned out light bulbs?


So what do we do with the Mercury? We recycle it! How? Well, since mercury is no longer used in thermometers, that market is a no go, but there is one popular use for mercury that never goes away. The world of vaccination has an everlasting need for mercury. Why? Well mercury acts as a preservative keeping the vaccine stable as it is used over and over preventing the plagues of the world.


So if we take those burned out bulbs and all that useless mercury and add it to our vaccine supply, that will ensure that it will be stable for a lot longer. Preservation for the masses. And when we need to use those vaccines we can inject babies. Why? Because we want to keep our babies healthy and disease free.


By making babies holding vessel for all of our unneeded mercury waste we take care of our light bulb problems and the inevitable future pollution problems those bulbs would cause. The ground water would never be rendered toxic, our salmon will never have brain damage, and our tuna will be able to be canned safely without fear of being canned with Mercury. The earth is saved!


Of course there comes a point when babies grow up. At that point babies are no longer appealing to the public and we won't want to take care of them by vaccinating them. These toddlers will need to be sent into space. And new babies will need to be created, of course. This cycle will need to continue until we no longer have to worry about the compact fluorescent bulbs and their accursed mercury. And what about those toddlers in space? Well eventually they will come back to earth's orbit. But don't worry, everyone loves shooting stars. Those toddlers will fill our days with thousands of millions of shooting stars...so make a wish everyone. Make a wish.