Undiscovered Gems

Did you know that there is an album entitled Pokemon Christmas Bash that features the voice actors of the original American cartoon singing a variety of new and modified Christmas carols?

(A memorable excerpt from “The Night Before Christmas:”

Ash: “Ohhh, it’s freezing out there!”

Misty: “Brrr, close the door!” [He does so.] Did you get more wood?”

Ash: “Ohhh yeaaahhh.”

I swear I am not making this up.  Sure, Ash is a 12-year old boy who does everything enthusiastically, including gathering firewood and telling others that he has, in fact, gathered firewood, but I like to think that someone got fired for that little double entendre.)

Did you know that there is an avant-garde metal band called the Diablo Swing Orchestra that blends metal and operatic singing and swing beats into something that can only be described as fantastic?

Did you know that an enterprising group of musicians have formed The Protomen and have released two acts of a Mega Man rock opera?

Did you know that there are artists out there who mash together Nine Inch Nails and Ray Parker Jr., the Muppet Show with the Stray Cats, Iron Maiden with David Bowie, and Daft Punk with everything?

Neither did I.  And then I went to college.

Have a good Thanksgiving, if you celebrate it.  If not, then you can GET OUTTA ‘MURIKA unless you don’t live in ‘Murika in which case STAY OUT YOU FREEDOM-HATIN’ FUR’NUR.

“Nothing He’s Got He Really Needs…”

We have so much stuff.

Unnecessary articles of clothing, such as scarves and ties and waistcoats and halter tops and the grand master of them all, the cummerbund.  We glorify them and exult in the possession of such items when, in reality, all of them are completely useless.

I own several ties, several vests and waistcoats, and a cummerbund, and I wear them all.

Knick-knacks and trinkets and obscure and ultimately useless tools that have no real value. Instead of moving on and keeping objects based on practicality, we cling to sentimentality and nostalgia and the allure of all things retro.

I have a small spyglass (rendered obsolete by the invention of porro prism binoculars back in the 1800s), a large collection of print and physical media (rendered obsolete by the massive progress made in the world of digital media in recent years), and vidjeo games (say what you will about hand-eye coordination, but those things are life-stealing timesinks).

The problem is not that we have this stuff.  The problem is that we are unwilling to give it up.  The Buddhist lifestyle is not one that appeals to many of Generation Y, or Generation Next, or the Millennials, iGeneration, or whatever stupid nickname ends up being applied to the late 80s/early 90s crowd that I belong to.

I suppose this makes me a materialistic pig then, neh?  Oh well.  We can’t all be perfect, and I have no interest in trying.

Save that for those arrogant fools in the court of the Crimson King.

Also, 60% done with NaNoWriMo.  Woo.

The Idea, Capital “I” and All

I sat with my muffin.

It was a mediocre muffin, as they all too often are in this place.  The little white index card gave it the intriguing title of “pumkin muffin;” apparently, when that “p” is left out of the word, it means “something that tastes vaguely of pumpkin pie but with an overpowering blend of spices that completely obscure any of that delightful canned pumpkin taste.”

As is my custom, I removed the muffin top with a knife and ate the bottom half first.

And that got me thinking, and we all know how that can be a dangerous thing to do.  But I thought, and I wondered, and I mulled, and I arrived at my conclusion.

We have incredibly complex technology at our disposal.  This is a fact.

We do plenty of experiments in space.  This is also a fact.

And so I present The Idea to you: the zero-G muffin or, as it will undoubtedly be known, the space muffin.

Actually, let me present that in a more dramatic manner:

SPAAAAAAAAAACE MUFFFFFFINNNNNNNN!

It’s simple, really.  We need to bring an oven into space.  And then we need to bring muffin batter into space.  And then we need to put perfect balls of muffin batter into the oven in such a manner that they will not move at all during the baking process so that they neither rest in a muffin tray or are bound by gravity.

And then we shall have perfectly spherical muffins, the entire outer surface of which will be coated in the essence of baked perfection: the muffin top.

Oh yes.  I am a genius.

“Know You the Art of PowerPoint?”

This is college, sir, or ma’am, or all of you who this applies to.  You know who you are.

This very well might be the high point of your educational life.  This is your one great shining opportunity to prove your worth as a human being, at least in the world of academia, and show us all that you’re able to meet the challenge head-on and wrestle it into submission.

And yet you seem to have already fallen into the abyss of the business world, for your presentation had all the lasting appeal of… well, the majority of the presentations I saw back in high school.  And that is not a compliment.

There’s a reason I don’t use the software unless I’m explicitly instructed to, especially in a setup where the only available screen is the projection behind you and you have to turn to face it in order to see where you are.  I prefer the old-fashioned methods: index cards, maybe a sheet of paper with an outline jotted down, in some cases perhaps even a prepared speech, and any tables or charts or images can go up on the overhead.  If I absolutely have to do such a presentation, I make it minimalist, and include brief bullet points and only what I need to prompt my memory and give people something to look at other than my face, devilishly handsome though it is.

But no.  You broke the cardinal rule of presenting to the class.  And for that, I hereby revoke and confiscate your PowerPoint license.

Your mother or father can come pick it up from the dean’s office after school.

NaNoWriMo: 20% Done

If portrayed in the proper light, death is funny.  In fact, death can be downright hilarious.

For example, the old joke about three travelers who are caught by a tribe of vicious natives who plan on making canoes out of their skins.  The travelers are given the choice on how they’d like to die; the first says by bow and arrow, the second says by spear… and the third asks for a fork.  The third traveler then jabs the fork into himself again and again and again until he’s bleeding all over himself in dozens of places.

The punchline: “You bastards won’t be getting a canoe out of me!”

Funny, no?  This joke is a racist and old-fashioned bit of humor that depends on the brutal and senseless murder of its three protagonists, with an extremely gruesome ending and a tiny tension-relieving lift at the end.  And yet it’s still funny.

In real life, it’s not funny.  When it’s someone we know or a friend of a friend, it’s not funny.  But when a celebrity accidentally dies through auto-erotic asphyxiation, we laugh.  When one of the most popular men in the world suddenly passes away, we laugh.  To our generation, more than sixty years after it ended, the Holocaust is still potent comedy material.

Oh, we are a wonderful race of people, are we not?  Imagine how much greater the world would be if we were all incapable of being amused.