audio

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Tear down the wall(s)!

I saw a video on YouTube yesterday in which a neuroscientist was being interviewed and asked to “grade” the danger level of various drugs—obviously not all of them since that would have taken far longer than the hour the video lasted.  Mind you, the video ran much more quickly for me, because this is one of those that I watch at 1.5 times speed, which I can get away with if I have the subtitles on and the speaker doesn’t speak too quickly.  I don’t do this for reaction videos or comedy videos, of course, and I certainly don’t do it with music or music reaction videos.  That would be absurd.

Anyway, watching the video, in which the scientist discussed the effects and mechanisms of action of the various drugs, made me think of something that has occurred to me before in recent months and years:  What if someone slipped MDMA (aka Ecstasy) into the food and/or water of all the members of the Senate and House of Representatives* before every legislative session?

This drug has the tendency to lower psychological barriers between people, to encourage a feeling of acceptance and a kind of “unconditional love”, without many other serious untoward effects in most cases (I have never tried it, but I have never tried most non-prescription drugs).  It would be rather interesting to see what legislatures could accomplish if they felt real warmth toward each other rather than seeing each other as opponents and even frank enemies**.  I wonder what might happen.

Alternatively, or similarly, it would be interesting to see a similar experiment involving the UN.  Heck, it would be great just to infuse every water-supply throughout the middle-east with MDMA.  I would not want to use any true hallucinogens in that region of the world, though—we don’t need new religions or spiritual notions popping up in a region that is already the wellspring of the western world’s absurd religious conflicts.

It would be great just to calm the overactive amygdalae of the people in the various legislatures and international organizations, to encourage their prefrontal cortices to be more active, so they can work together for the good of the people they have chosen (and competed) to represent—and whom they fail every time they put partisan hostility above the best interests of the people of the country.  Maybe it would be simpler just to fit all legislators and similar officials with shock collars that activate any time that individual’s voice goes above a certain decibel level, or when a localized EEG detects too much activity in the limbic system and not enough in the frontal lobes.

This is all pipe dreaming, of course, though there’s nothing in the laws of physics that prevents either of these notions from being brought to bear.  Still, it’s probably refreshing to see me thinking of plots and plans intended to work to help people get along better rather than just to obliterate them from the face of the cosmos***.  Though that may well be more likely to happen, considering the warnings of a recent book I just got.

This book is If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies, a warning book about the dangers of superintelligent AI, written by one of my favorite thinkers, Eliezer Yudkowsky, and his coauthor, Nate Soares.  They appeared (so to speak) on Sam Harris’s podcast that came out yesterday.  Now, I have not listened to the entire podcast yet, and I certainly haven’t read the book yet, but I have little doubt that the authors are at least not far wrong in their warnings.

I’m not going to go into those arguments now, because you can (and should) read the book or at least look into Eliezer Yudkowsky’s work and ideas.  His book Rationality:  From AI to Zombies is a masterpiece, and though it is long, it is divided into easily ingested chunks, since it started out as a long series of blog posts.

I occasionally toy with the idea of doing podcast type stuff like Sam Harris and so many others—indeed, I have done several of what I call “audio blogs” since I don’t know if they would technically count as podcasts—because people really seem to prefer listening to people talk more than they prefer reading.  This is despite the fact that reading is faster and requires less data to convey the same number of ideas.

I don’t know.  It’s probably better for the world if my thoughts and ideas achieve the least penetration into the zeitgeist as possible.  Still, maybe I’ll embed a few examples of my “audio blogs” here for anyone interested in listening, to see if you think it would be worth it for me to do more.

Please have a good day.

On fatigue, depression, general relativity, and spaceships becoming discoid black holes:

___

Morgoth, Arda, redemption, morality, and blame:

___

The Cosmic Perspective:

*If you live in a country other than the US—as most people do—then substitute your own legislative bodies for these.

**It astonishes me how people in the same legislature, in the same country, see each other as opponents and even as “evil” based almost entirely upon the arbitrary and absurd notion of political party.  It’s ridiculous enough when people arbitrarily choose to be loyal to some specific sports team and then hate other ones based purely on that arbitrary self-identification, but when it involves people who are supposed to be trying to manage the governance of the nation, or state, or county, or what have you, it smacks of a complete lack of seriousness and maturity, of childishness.

***Though I still like my idea of getting someone to engineer the mumps virus to make it more likely to cause orchitis****, especially if it can be encouraged to make males more likely to be sterile.  That way we would decrease the population of those who are prone to avoid vaccinations.  But that’s me in my mad scientist mode.

****Inflammation of the testes, a relatively rare complication of mumps.

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A 2sday blog post 4 U

Okay, well, it’s Tuesday now, which often happens immediately after the end of Monday, at least when one is using the ordering of days that we use here in the modern, technological world, agreed upon just by general convention, since there’s no particular real meaning to any such ordering.  Also, of course, the specific names of the days varies from language to language.  But somehow, the seven-day week became the generally accepted one worldwide—possibly partly because it’s a prime number, and of course, partly related to the number of “non-fixed” celestial bodies visible before the invention of the telescope.

Not that any of that is very interesting, but it’s not as though I make it my business to write interesting blog posts.  I just…write blog posts.  Whether they’re interesting or not is pretty much in the eye of the beholder, as it were.

I think maybe I will embed the audio of my recent recording of Nothing Compares 2 U below, which I mentioned last week some time.  The audio is not ideal, of course, but it’s better than one might expect.  Whether the playing and singing is any good is, again, up to the aesthetic taste of each individual who happens to listen.  I make no promises or guarantees or representations about it being particularly good.  It’s okay, I would say.

As for other things, well, this morning I did not walk to the train station, nor did I bike here.  I’m still at the stage of working on my fitness in which I have to take a day off in between walks.  That’s not so disappointing, I guess; I did walk about seven or so miles total yesterday.  The biggest impediment so far to walking two or more days in a row is that my left knee is a bit sore from yesterday’s walk.

You might think I would be used to pain by now; I haven’t had a day free of significant pain in a quarter of a century now.  Unfortunately, biology mandates that pain is not something with which a living thing can easily become “comfortable”.

At least the blisters on my right foot are not acting up.  I wore a different pair of shoes than usual yesterday, a make and model I haven’t worn in a while, and it seems they were kinder to my heel and Achilles tendon than the others.

It’s rather frustrating.  I like the other kind because they are very lightweight and “breathable” if you want to call it that.  That’s important in south Florida, where merely standing still for more than five minutes is likely to lead to the growth of various fungi and algae on your skin*.

At least there’s always Lysol.  It helps if you pretend you work for a bowling alley and have to spray each pair of shoes after it’s been used to make sure no one catches a fungus from the previous wearer.  Even when that wearer is you, you don’t want to have a foot fungus if you can help it.

Ugh, all this is so boring, isn’t it?  Life is almost entirely composed of boredom interspersed with stress and tension anymore.  When I meditate, which I do, it helps my tension and stress and hostility a bit, but I find myself feeling very depressed instead.  It’s quite annoying.  Is tension and stress my only alternative to profound depression anymore?  Perhaps.  The world is overall so utterly idiotic and frustrating, this is just par for the course, as they say.

Despite the fact that I’m sharing a bit of singing here today, I haven’t played my guitar or sang even for a moment in over a week.  I haven’t really done anything creative or expressive in a long time, unless you count this blog (which I don’t, honestly).

I am rereading The Lord of the Rings, which is always good, at least.  I’m in The Two Towers now, at the point where Pippin and Merry have just met Treebeard.

It occurs to me that I tend to write (and think of) that pair of hobbits as “Pippin and Merry” rather than “Merry and Pippin”, despite the fact that Merry is the first alphabetically and in the stories Merry is slightly older.  It’s peculiar.  It’s not important or anything, but it is odd.

I also tend to write “off” accidentally nearly every time I’m trying to write the word “odd”, but that’s not so peculiar (ha ha).  The “d” and “f” keys are right next to each other on the keyboard, and both words (“odd” and “off”) are legitimate words.  They also can both often be workable in the same context.  Calling something “a little off” can be synonymous with calling something “a little odd”.  Curious.

My train will be arriving soon.  I am sorry to have to admit that I have provided nothing of value here.  That’s not too unusual for me, though.  I’m not sure that I’ve ever contributed anything of value to the world other than my children.  They are valuable, of course, so I’m not unhappy about that.  I’m just unhappy by nature, and I’m unhappy about that fact, and that further fact is something about which I am, again, unhappy.  It’s like an infinite series**, and the question is, does it converge to some finite limit, or does it diverge to negative infinity?  I don’t know.

And sometimes—most days, maybe—I share that unhappiness with you, my all-too-generous readers.  It seems grossly unfair to you.  And it is.  I admire your optimism, though.  I don’t understand it.  But I do admire it.

Have a good day,  You might as well.  Somebody ought to do it.

*I’m exaggerating, of course.  It usually takes as much as ten minutes.

**Mathematically, I mean, not like, say, The Simpsons, or Superman comics.

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“This is the moooorning report…”

Well, it’s Monday, and you’ve all had a brief respite since Saturday, but now here I am with a new blog post to torment you.  I’m cruel that way.

Yesterday was Super Bowl Sunday here in the US.  I watched most of the 1st half of the game, but it got boring because it was pretty obvious that Philadelphia’s defense was all but impregnable.  I was certainly impressed, and I admired their skills, but a blowout is never as exciting as a close game.

I tried to get in a little walking this morning, and I got in roughly 2.5 miles before heading in to work.  I don’t know whether it will do me any good, but I’m trying to begin a new regimen*.

I often like to paraphrase‒in my own head‒the last words of Doc Ock from Spider-Man II:  “I will not die a monster”.  Well, I try to say to myself, “I will not die a fatty.”  That may sound bad according to modern, politically correct social mores, but I certainly intend no body shaming for anyone else.  The only reason I might suggest weight control to another person (if asked) would be with respect to health, not aesthetics.

For myself, however, I have always been a sadistic, judgmental asshole of a martinet, psychologically and often physically self-abusive, and I hate how I look now.  I am objective enough about myself to admit that, at times in the past, I was reasonably good-looking**.  But that is not the case anymore, not for quite a while now.  I’ve been through and seen some serious shit since the last time I looked my “local” best, so I have some legitimate excuses, but that doesn’t satisfy me.

Fortunately, I’ve been changing my dietary patterns, and that has apparently been altering my appetite, and the decrease in certain kinds of foods has increased my physical energy at least a bit.  So I hope to be able to ratchet that up into regular walking, using time with which I don’t have anything better to do so that at least I can leave behind a decent looking corpse.

We’ll see what happens, but it can’t be too bad a thing to want to try to get more exercise.

I’m also rereading The Chasm and the Collision, just to see if I can get back into the mood to write.  I doubt it, but at least I’m still finding it enjoyable.  You should all buy it and read it.  You can get it for someone for Valentine’s Day if you want.  It’s got a little bit of innocent romance in it (the main characters are middle-schoolers, so there’s nothing very steamy).

If you want a sample, I recorded myself reading the first nine chapters, and that’s up on my YouTube channel, here.

Also, I decided to use the time while I was walking to begin listening to and using the Audible version of the Pimsleur beginning Russian course.  I’ve always thought Russian sounds nice, as a language‒at least when women speak it.  I have no particular interest in interacting with Russian-speaking men (though I have nothing against them) so I leave them out of my calculations.

I probably would have seemed peculiar, walking along the streets of south Florida at 4:30 in the morning, periodically trying to match Russian phrases and words out loud, but no one was really around.  I’m a pretty good mimic, so I hope to get decent results.  It’s a productive use of the time, at least.

That’s about it for today, I think.  I hope you all are at least not too unenthusiastic about the new work week.  Do your best.  I don’t know how to say that in Russian yet, so here it is in Japanese:  Ganbatte! [頑張って]

*And it’s “regimen” for something like a disciplined and planned program of activity, not “regime”, which refers to the reign of some sovereign, either literally or metaphorically.

**I had a girl friend (not girlfriend, at least not at the time) in high school who once told me I was just as cute as [redacted], who was one of my three best friends.  This was a generous exaggeration, as far as I can see.  Even when my (then) fiancee met [redacted], she told me that he was “every girl’s dream”.  Based on my experience as his best friend, I think she was probably right, but that’s something not even she ever said of me.  That’s okay, [redacted] is a good dude.

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Fetter strong madness in a silken thread, charm ache with air and agony with blogs.

Hello and good morning.

As anyone who has read my recent posts will know, I have not been doing well, depression-wise*.  Yesterday afternoon, after sharing a “memory” on Facebook (a picture of my son from one of the last times I was with him) and explaining in the comments that the reason I hadn’t seen him was that he didn’t want to see me, I felt particularly low, and had to fight to keep from crying openly in the office.  Thankfully, it was a slow afternoon (as opposed to a very stressful morning, in which I was working on payroll among other things), or I wouldn’t have been involved with Facebook, anyway.

I was so low that I started Googling (on my phone) the lethal doses of everything from CBD gummies** to aspirin to Benadryl to a combination of fentanyl and Valium.

That latter combo, of course, is the only reliably life-threatening thing among the many that I searched, but honestly, I knew all that already.  I am a trained medical doctor, after all, and I have a long-standing interest in ways to make one’s quietus‒including, but not limited to, a bare bodkin.  I was mostly reviewing things like the mg/kg dosage needed to be more or less certain one would die.

The biggest downside of the opiate/benzodiazepine combination is that they are controlled substances.  Just try to get a prescription for the two of them without a terminal cancer diagnosis or something similar.  Go ahead, try.  If you succeed, please get in touch with me.

Of course, there are illicit sources of both classes of medicine, and I even know some people who might know where to get them.  But such people, and such illicit medicines, are supremely untrustworthy, so that’s not great.  I probably wouldn’t accept anything that wasn’t a name-brand pill, like the Valium tablets that at least used to have a big V stamped in them.

I suppose one could try to con one’s way into getting a veterinary cocktail such as might be used to euthanize a large dog or something similar.  I can do injections, obviously, even to myself.  But I am not good at conning people, and I certainly wouldn’t want to deceive a kindhearted veterinarian.  That seems very uncool.

Alas, most OTC medicines are unreliable for many reasons, including limited absorption, nausea/vomiting, and other rather unpleasant symptoms that would precede death by quite some time, and might be awful enough to cause even the most committed would-be suicide to seek relief.  It’s very hard to fight deep-seated biological survival drives, believe me.

Oh well, there are always many options, I guess, and I have the necessaries for many of them.  I even used to have some helium tanks and a nonrebreather mask, but I gave the helium to people making balloons for parties‒they didn’t have the right kind of connectors for the regulator and mask I have, and I wasn’t confident of my ability to jury-rig something.

I don’t want any of you to think I simply wallow in depression, and my chronic pain, and my horrible sleep issues, and possible neurodevelopmental difficulties.  I am constantly attempting new exercises, new habits, autosuggestion, self-hypnosis, meditation, dietary adjustments, postures, medicines, and so forth to try to help my problems.  I don’t ever stop doing all that, which is exhausting in and of itself.

It’s likewise exhausting to keep trying to act as normal as I possibly can, because I don’t like to cause other people more trouble than I absolutely must.  Also, it’s just my lifelong habit to try to act upbeat or to try to be funny, at least during direct interaction.  But it’s very tiring, and over the years, my grumpy side has definitely gained more ascendance, particularly at work.

Not that I’m an asshole at work, at least not any more than I’m just an asshole in general.  But the noise in the office and people making really unreasonable, sloppy mistakes, stress me out quite a bit, and the frustration bleeds through more than it used to.

Sometimes that happens literally.

Anyway, more and more I’ve been just working and struggling merely to survive.  I haven’t been working anymore on Outlaw’s Mind since the last time I mentioned it here; I haven’t even been taking my little laptop back and forth with me, though I type much more quickly on it than I can on my phone.  The closest thing to any creativity I’ve done recently is as follows:

On Tuesday morning, something I read (I don’t recall what) made me think of infrasound and low-pitched noises that are reputed*** to be able to instill a sense of fear or dread in people.  There was some indication that a 7 Hertz noise would be troubling in some way‒I don’t recall how‒but one needs a serious sub-woofer to be able to generate such a pitch at all, let alone with useful volume.

However, the low range of the human audible threshold starts around 40 Hertz, so I thought I would do something at least mildly interesting.  I pulled up Audacity and generated two tones:  one at 47 Hertz and one at, I think, 73 Hertz, and merged them.  I chose those frequencies because, since they are both prime numbers, their waveforms would not tend to overlap very much, and so their constructive/destructive interference would tend to be relatively chaotic, producing a pleasing (so to speak) deep and unsteady rumble.

Then, I recorded myself doing an impromptu recitation of Hamlet’s soliloquy****, which (of course) I know from memory.  I first lowered the pitch of that recording a bit, but not using the optional maximum quality pitch change (I didn’t want it to sound normal) after filtering out background noise and even breath sounds*****.

Then, I copied that track and shifted its pitch a step and a half, then copied that and did the same again.  This produced three simultaneous recordings of the same thing, but with pitches at intervals that make it into a constant diminished chord (that’s where the third and fifth tones of a major triad are each reduced by a half step, making an eerie, haunting, somewhat dissonant chord).

Then I combined those three vocal tracks into one, put a bit of reverb on it, lowered the pitch again until it was at least close to that of my background tones, and combined them all after trying to adjust the balance to make sure that the vocal stuff was not quite clearly present against the background sound.

I then turned it into an MP3 file and put it on loop on the big TV we use as our room sales board, starting it once people came in, and only very slowly increasing the volume from too low to hear to just audible.

One coworker noticed it, and she kept trying to figure out what it was saying, or if anything was being said at all.  I explained what I had done, to her and to my “main” coworker, who also sort of heard the noise and looked puzzled.  They both thought it was odd but funny, but it was apparently also mildly irritating (almost the point of it, really), so once they said that, I stopped the playback.

I’ll embed the audio file here, below, in case you want to listen.  Feel free to use it to annoy or unnerve other people, if you wish.

And that’s it, that’s all I have for now, from the most creative to the most wishfully self-destructive (not in that order).  I hope each and every one of you is feeling better than I feel.  On any given day, at any given time, I think my odds of that being the case are good.  If I were able to bet even money on it even once an hour, I think I’d pretty quickly have an excellent return on investment.  Though, that might improve my mood and so alter the expected payoff rate of my investment…damn those economic feedback loops.

TTFN

*Though my depression, if considered as an entity with a “life” of its own, is thriving, thank you very much.

**There more or less is no practical lethal dose, it seems.  The sugar in a gummy would probably kill you before the CBD would.

***Almost certainly untruthfully.

****The most famous one, “To be or not to be…”

*****Removing these throughout a recording has a curious way of deadening it, and it’s rather unpleasant if you’re trying to produce something that sounds good, so was ideal for my pseudo-purposes.

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Sleep that knits up the ravell’d blog of care

Hello and good morning.

As those of you who read this blog regularly know, I’ve been ill for almost two weeks now.  I can’t say that I’m fully recovered yet, but‒unfortunately‒I am getting better.  In the early stages of the illness, when I stayed at the house for two of the days of last week, I was at least able to get a bit of extra sleep, thanks to that tendency of the body’s response to illness.  Since then, though, I seem to have rebounded into worse than usual insomnia.  I feel truly horrible, and I also have a persistent cough that’s irritating.

I wonder if there’s anyone out there from my past who truly hates me.  If so, I hope they stumble across this blog, or have already done so, so that they can at least experience a bit of schadenfreude.  It would be nice to think that my pathetic discomfort and self-hatred were at least bringing some joy to the world.  It might be spiteful joy, but I’ll take what I can get.  It’s not as though I’m very good at bringing joy to people I care about and who care about me for very long, at least when they are in regular, close proximity.

My subconscious mind gave me a slight birthday present on Sunday, in that I woke up with a little tune in my head that I’d heard in a dream.  I wasn’t sure if it was something I’ve heard before, but I didn’t and don’t think so.  Anyway, I felt compelled to work out the tune and then put chords to it on Sunday.  Then, Monday morning, I very quickly worked out the guitar melody and chords and did a quick little production of that.  It’s only 16 bars long, so that was easy enough.

I posted the audio here on Monday.  I also made a weird little video with it on my phone; I’ve tried to play with Instagram lately, just because I have a default account since I have a Facebook account.  I posted the combined video there and on YouTube (see below).

I think it was too much of a distraction making my strange introduction and then adding the weird effects.  That was me just playing around with the Clip Champ app from Microsoft, just to see what I could do with it.  But my intro is longer than the song, and I don’t think it adds much.

Anyway, if anyone recognizes the tune from somewhere, please let me know.  If not, I guess this was my personal Yesterday* kind of moment, though my tune is much more banal than Sir Paul’s.  There’s no real shame in that, though.  The vast majority of all songs ever written are not as good as Yesterday.

On a whim, I worked out the tune of another (pre-existing) song on an online keyboard yesterday‒I don’t even recall what song‒but it was interesting that I ended up “singing” it in my head in C Major/A minor.  It wasn’t deliberate, and I only realized it as I finished working out the whole melody.

This was striking because that was the key signature that the above, dream-based song came out in, and in which it is played, above.  However, I know that is not the key in which I originally dreamed it, because as soon as I woke up with it in my head on Sunday, I opened my phone’s voice recorder and tried to sort of hum the tune into it.  I’ll put that recording right here, as evidence (or whatever).

As I knew my voice was hoarse, and I wasn’t sure how well it would come across later (even to me) it wasn’t long before I opened up the online virtual keyboard (it was too early to use the real one) and worked out and wrote down the tune.

Anyway, the point is, between the time I had hummed the tune directly after my dream, which I’m pretty sure was in the key in which I dreamed it, and when I worked it out on the virtual keyboard, I’d taken it from G-sharp major/F minor (which I think is roughly the key in which I hummed it) to C major/A minor.  I don’t know why this happened, but it does make nearly all the black key notes go away.  C major is the simplest, most basic key‒in a sense, anyway‒whereas G-sharp major has its root on a black key.

I’d like to imagine that my subconscious mind corrected it to an easier key signature for me, and that’s not entirely beyond the realm of possibility.  I’ve been playing piano since I was nine (not continuously) and cello since I was ten (ditto), if only at a very flippant and superficial level, never developing any real skill with either instrument (and I do not have perfect pitch in the sense of being able to tell you what note is being played when I hear it, but I can certainly tell if something it out of tune with itself and otherwise deal with relative pitch).  Still, my subconscious might very well have enough imprinted memory of notes and scales to steer me toward easier keys when I’m writing something or sounding out something by ear.

All of this, though, is just a meandering distraction.  I’m not likely to do anything more with my dream-based tune, even if I become more firmly convinced that it’s mine.  I’ve occasionally found myself humming some impromptu lyrics to it in my head, but they are horrifyingly bad and stupid.  Compared to them, McCartney’s first lyrics to Yesterday‒“scambled eggs…dah dah dah dah dah, I love your legs”‒are worthy of Shakespeare or Milton.

So I’m not going to tell anyone what those are.  Anyway, sixteen bars do not a song make, as Yoda might say, so if I were going to turn it into something, I’d need to extrapolate.  That’s not hard to do once you’ve got a basic melody, but it requires you to have the drive to make a song.

I have no such drive for anything, really.  I can barely write this blog, and I am only doing it because I am a creature of habit and routine.  I am thoroughly exhausted by my worsening sleep, and I feel as though I’m experiencing the world through a multi-dimensional haze.  I’m also very depressed and I miss my kids and all the various other people for whom I’ve been too unpleasant for them to want to stay around anymore.

From day to day, and for a very long time, I have been thoroughly alone, and I fear that serves the greater good of the people who matter to me.  Even this week at work, since I’ve been here every day, has been far less successful than the days when I was out of the office.  Everything tends to be better when I’m not around.

I’m not living; I’m just waiting to die.  It’s taking a long frikking time, though, and I’m running out of patience and energy.  But I still can’t seem to sleep.  As the Ramones sang, “I wanna be sedated”.  I wonder if Michael Jackson’s old doctor is making house calls**.

TTFN

*Every Breath You Take had a similar origin.

**Is it too soon to be joking about him?  I have long been personally affronted by the fact that he spent less time in prison than I did.  Then again, he wasn’t in Florida.

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This is NOT a quote from Shakespeare (as far as I know)

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, the first of February in 2024 (AD or CE) and I’m writing a blog post for the day even though I’m not at all sure of any good reason to do so.  I even began it in the traditional way (“Hello and good morning”) in which I have usually started my Thursday blogs, going back to when Thursday was the only day of the week I wrote them, reserving all other days for writing fiction.

I don’t think I’m going to do a modified Shakespeare quote for the title, today, though.  It’s too much of a pain and takes too long, since all of the most obvious ones have already been used.  I suppose I might change my mind before the time I publish this, in which case, you will already know, though I do not know as I’m writing it.

As the 11th Doctor said:  “Time travel; you can’t keep it straight in your head.”

Yesterday’s blog post title was an actual quote from the song I referenced in the footnote.  It’s a good song (off OK Computer).  Radiohead did an amazing job making sounds that were evocative of the notion of aliens and the like, and it has the wonderful little riff at the beginning and end.

That album really is one of the greatest albums ever.  It’s not a concept album.  Radiohead is too eclectic a band, I think, ever to try to make a concept album, though their albums tend to have an internal cohesiveness to them.  They often are very careful and strict about the order in which to put their songs, and which ones to include.

For instance, in OK/not OK, their rerelease of OK Computer a few years ago, they included several songs on the “not OK” portion that they hadn’t included in the original, some of which they left out because they didn’t match the tone of the album.  I certainly understand where they were coming from, but it’s a mild shame to have had to wait so long for songs such as Polyethylene (Parts 1 & 2), Man of War, I Promise, and Lift.

That last one is one of my very favorite Radiohead songs.  It sounds too upbeat and hopeful for the tone of OK Computer, but I take that as “deliberately” misleading, a slightly different version of what they did with No Suprises (in which the song sounds like a beautiful lullaby, but the lyrics tell a very different story—I did my own “live” cover of that song, because it’s so representative of how I feel much of the time).  Alternatively, one could say that the tone of Lift is positive because the singer takes a very different attitude toward the subject matter as I take it from the song compared to most people, and is optimistic about it.

I interpret Lift, consistent with my biases and attitude, to be a song about escaping from life (by dying).  “This is the place.  Sit down.  You’re safe now.  You’ve been stuck in a lift.  We’ve been trying to reach you, Thom*.  This is the place.  It won’t hurt ever again.”  And, of course, later there’s the line, “You’ve been stuck in a lift, in the belly of a whale, at the bottom of the ocean**.”

I interpret this as expressing the thoughts of someone who’s finally getting out of all the stress and pain and horror of life (the lift, the two words being only off by one letter) into the safety and freedom from pain that is death.

On the other hand, the song ends with the words, “Today is the first day of the rest of your days.  So lighten up, Squirt.”  That could be taken as life-affirming and optimistic, and I’m by no means certain that Radiohead intended the song to be about what I take it to be about—my biases are clear and obvious, even to me—but that last line can still work in my interpretation.  After all, he doesn’t say it’s the first day of the rest of your life but of the rest of your days.

I’m overreading things, probably.  In any case, it’s a great song, and if you want to interpret it in a positive, life-affirming way, by all means, please do so.  It’s art, innit?  You can interpret it according to your impressions.  Just remember, this was a song from the time in which the band created (or at least finished) such tracks as Exit Music (For A Film), Climbing Up the Walls, Let Down, Fitter Happier, and of course, the aforementioned No Surprises.

As for other “not OK” songs, I really love Man of War, which was reportedly inspired by James Bond.  The video for the modern release is brilliant and haunting.  I also really like both to listen to and to play and sing Polyethylene (Parts 1 & 2), though I haven’t done so in quite a long time.  I did a video of myself playing and singing it once, but it’s not up on YouTube.  I didn’t think it was very good, and I think my voice broke at one point.  I might have shared it here, though.  Yes?  No?  I’ll try to find out before I publish this.  If so, I’ll put a link:  Here.

If not, I won’t***.

By the way, I’m writing this post on my laptop computer (is it an OK computer?  It’s pretty darn good, at least), for the same reason I did so yesterday:  to give my thumbs some rest.  That does seem to be doing at least some good.  The bases of my thumbs are still quite sore when I rub them, and they feel stiff, but at least typing doesn’t make it worse, since I don’t use my thumbs during regular typing.

Anyway, that’s probably all I need to inflict on you today.  I did not know, when I started this post, that I would be mostly discussing Radiohead songs.  I do really like them, though.  And the new mini-band, The Smile, that Jonny Greenwood and Thom Yorke have formed, along with Tom Skinner, has some good songs as well, though I haven’t listened to all of them.  Their recent video for Friend of a Friend has the trio performing for what seems to be a group of elementary school students, and at the end, after bowing to the pleased audience, Thom has a nice little smile on his face.

Who could not smile after having a bunch of young kids cheer for your song?

Anyway, that’s enough for today.  The train is going to be here in a moment, and it’s not as though I have any further agenda.  My pain is nearly back to its usual baseline level, which is not great, but at least I’m more or less accustomed to it.  I’m not going to insert a picture in this blog post, unless I change my mind, but if I do, you’ll already know.

I may write a post tomorrow, but I may not.  It’s more likely than the possibility of me writing some fiction tomorrow, though, sad though that fact may be.

TTFN

*I usually sing it as “We’ve been trying to reach you, Rob.”

**This line “reminds” me of the ending of Weird Fishes/Arpeggi, another brilliant song, which closes with the words, “I…I hit the bottom…hit the bottom and escape…escape.”

***I have no such link, but I do have the original video file.  I decided not to share or upload that, but quickly rendered the audio from it, did a little noise reduction, compression, added some reverb and so on.  You can hear my voice really break at 2:13 or so, but that’s not the only time.  I think you can hear why I didn’t put this video on YouTube, but I like my little comment at the end, so I didn’t even edit out my cringey “Ohhhhh”s, though they are embarrassing.  Here it is:

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A monotone audio blog that may or may not be monotonous in other senses

Here is the audio recording I did this morning because I didn’t feel like typing anything.  As you will hear (if you listen) I am not really feeling very upbeat, even for me.  Sorry.  I don’t know if I have anything at all interesting to say.  If I do, well…enjoy, I guess.

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Stories and simulated universes and Laplace’s Demon and related stuff

Here are just some thoughts I spoke out loud this morning because I didn’t feel like writing.  They took a surprising course, but I hope they might be interesting.  Please let me know what you think.

Here are some links to my stories/books to which I referred in this audio blog.

Penal Colony

Dr. Elessar’s Cabinet of Curiosities

Welcome to Paradox City

And here’s the home page for Nick Bostrum, a very smart philosopher (he’s younger than I am!  I didn’t realize that before).

And here’s the link to Sean Carroll’s podcast, which I readily recommend.

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Thoughts on confident statements about scientific fallibility

This is some audio I recorded this morning trying to follow up on the subject I brought up near the end of my last “audio blog”.  It relates to overconfidence about scientific pronouncements and so on both by the experts and by those who think they know the “real” motivations of the experts, particularly relating to the issues in the pandemic and so on.  It was triggered by a snippet of a conversation between Bill Maher and Seth MacFarlane, but I’m not sure where to find the original snippet.

As you will note, I did NOT make it shorter than my last audio.

[There is an interruption in the middle–presaged and followed by three chirps–in which I say what I had meant to say upon bringing up a particular subject, but then distracted myself completely by discussing some excellent YouTube channels about science and math.]

Here are some links to the YouTube channels I mentioned (along with one or two I did not) and which distracted me.  I heartily endorse them:

PBS Spacetime

PBS Eons

PBS Infinite Series

Be Smart

Numberphile

Sixty Symbols

Deep Sky Videos

Periodic Videos

Computerphile

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Some morning thoughts on Tri-rail, etc., and embedded “video” from Friday

Here’s some new audio in which I discuss–well, audio, and also health and my lack of desire for it, and then some relatively minor complaints I have with the Tri-rail system/stations/train.

And here is an embedded “video” version of my last audio blog from 1-5-2024.  Apparently I discussed Clipchamp and something about astrophysics or some such, I don’t recall.  Let me know, please.

Thank you.