silliness

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Cool it with a baboon’s blog, then the charm is firm and good

Hello and good morning.

It’s Thursday, the 25th of June.  This means we are at the more or less exact temporal antipode of Christmas, which was six months ago and will be six months from now.  Does that imply that we might all be feeling the “anti-Christmas spirit”?

Maybe the cycle acts something like a half-integer spin quantum entity, such as electron, and it takes two full rotations to bring it back to its initial state.  Or, rather, it could be like a spin 2 particle (e.g., the hypothetical graviton), rotating ½ times and being the same as where it started.

No, I guess it really seems like just a spin 1 particle, where half a rotation leaves it 180 degrees (or pi radians) different.  So:  Merry Anti-Christmas (you filthy animals).

I know, that’s rather silly.  But that’s okay, so was Monty Python’s Flying Circus.  Mind you, they were much funnier than I am.  That’s no real shame on me, though.  It’s rather like saying that the Beatles were much better song-writers overall than I am.  It’s true, but it’s also true of nearly everyone else in the world (that the Beatles were better song-writers than they are, or that Monty Python was funnier than they are, not that they are funnier or better song-writers than I am).

I’m also not as accomplished a scientist as Newton or Darwin or Einstein or as good a mathematician as Noether or Ramanujan or Euler.  This is nothing about which I (or you) should feel ashamed.  These are among the finest minds the world has yet produced.

On the other hand, none of them has a publication credit in the scientific journal Mycoses, do they?  No, they do not.  But I do.

Also, I have literally and directly saved people’s lives and helped ease and even prevent their suffering, whereas I don’t know that any of the above people ever did that, not directly* anyway.  So, neener neener neener!

Oh, by the way‒or by the by, or by Grabthar’s** hammer and by the suns of Worvan‒I have written all my posts this week so far on the smartphone, not on the lapcom.  And I am trying very hard to avoid writing too long a post.  I have seen that I can really write a lot with either the lapcom or the smartphone, though it’s easier in a sense to do so on the lapcom; it’s also easier and quicker for me to lose track of how much I have written thereon.

Oh, and another “by the fill-in-the-blank”:  I wanted to point out that yesterday’s voice recording thing was recorded using my smartphone, not any kind of fancy mic (those are fancy mics on smartphones, really, but not in a pertinent way), so unfortunately, it’s hard to keep breath sounds out of it.  And the tunnel kind of sound is probably because I (injudiciously, it seems) added a wee bit of reverb in post, to try to counter the flatness produced by the “noise reduction” function.  Sorry about that.

I tried a goofy little thing on the phone yesterday (speaking of such things) where I took a brief video, but with a thin cloth over the camera, so it was a video that was really just audio, but in principle it could have been uploaded without trouble directly to YouTube, etc., but no one would need to see me.

I don’t really like my face, so I don’t like to have to see it, let alone to inflict it on the world.  If you look at my relatively sparse YouTube videos, you’ll see that even when my face is shown, I usually try to cover it at least partially.

The exceptions, I guess, are the music-playing videos, but in those it just wouldn’t make as much sense to cover my face, since my singing would probably suffer.  Though, who knows, maybe I could become famous as a performer who always wears a mask and sunglasses.  M F Doom wore a mask.  Daft Punk wore their weird space uniforms.

This subject calls to mind the fact that yesterday evening I received a package from my sister.  It contained, among other things, some old stuff of mine, including a big print of my high school senior picture, which I didn’t know still existed.  I didn’t think to get a picture or a scan of it before writing this, but maybe I’ll do so later, so you can see it and I can learn if you agree that I resemble a certain character (not the hero) from a very popular movie franchise.

Anyway, as one of the spirits summoned by the three wyrd sisters said in Macbeth, “Dismiss me.  Enough.”

Tyler:  This conversation…

Narrator:  This conversation…

Tyler:  …is over.

Narrator:  …is over.

TTFN

*Of course, their various contributions have shaped all of modern science, and thus technology, and have thus indirectly saved many lives and relieved much suffering, far more than my little, localized efforts have done.  Still, let me throw myself a bone, okay?

**I initially wrote, going from memory, “by Frothgar’s hammer”, but then I realized that was a slightly bastardized name from Beowulf, i.e., Hrothgar, the Danish “king” whom Beowulf rescues from the depredations of Grendel, not the line from Galaxy Quest.

 

[Aside:  it would be cool if someone made a simulated spin-½ coin, with inertial sensors within and LCD faces, so that it could start, say, at heads, flip once and be intermediate, flip twice and be tails, flip three times and be oppositely intermediate, and flip a fourth time to come back to heads!]

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Wee are the champignons, but I still won’t eat them

First of all, I want to say, “Happy birthday, Mom, wherever you may be.”  So, here goes:

Happy birthday, Mom, wherever you may be.

My mother would have appreciated that joke, so if anyone out there is inclined to be offended on her behalf, well…you’d better check yourself before you wreck yourself, like the song said.  My mother’s sense of humor was very goofy and giggly and rather silly.  I got a goodly fraction of my sense of humor from her; she had extra, and no one else wanted it, so I got a very good deal.

Oh, on an unrelated note, I would like to note that, today, I am wearing cologne (or, well, aftershave, but I see no serious difference between the two things–one is named after a German city* and the other is just named for when you use it, as long as you’re not averse to the sting of alcohol on a freshly shaved face, which I am not, depending on whose face it is).  I felt awkward having yesterday used the misheard lyric from Whitesnake which says that I was born to wear cologne, when I wasn’t wearing cologne.

Of course, I’ve never really been like a drifter, either.

I do, unfortunately, drift and meander in my writing, at least when it’s nonfiction (broadly speaking) and when I’m trying not to write about my negative thoughts and feelings so I don’t bring people down too much.  That’s not as easy as it might seem, because those thoughts and feelings are always there, and they’ve been there for nearly as long as I can remember.

I’m not sure why they are there; presumably, and apparently, a lot of it has to do with my until-recently-undiagnosed ASD, but there’s also just something of a tendency toward dysthymia/depression in especially my Dad’s side of the family.

Though, honestly, there was almost certainly ASD on that side of the family, too**.  I would be very surprised if my father could not have been so diagnosed, though he was surely “Level 1”, whereas I am said to be “Level 2”.

Speaking of my Dad‒which I was‒I guess I should wish him a belated Happy Birthday, wherever he may be.  His birthday was a month ago today (it was a Saturday, so I wrote no blog post).

My own birthday is exactly in between my parents’ birthdays, which was something of a choice on their part; I was born by elective c-section, which was the usual practice in that era if one had previously had a c-section, which my mother had.  So they had at least some choice about the specific day on which I would be born.

They couldn’t just pick willy-nilly, of course.  If they had tried to wait until December, it would not have worked, and September would have been disastrous.  Probably even early November wouldn’t have panned out.  Still, I think they had at least a few days’ window in either direction, so‒it’s my understanding‒they picked my birthday to be right between theirs.

It’s the sort of thing I might have done, myself, so I appreciate it.

Let’s see now, what else is going on?  Of course, there are many things happening in the world, as is always the case, and many of those things seem and feel quite momentous to the people who see them or experience them.  From a certain point of view, they are indeed important, of course.  But I imagine that the average Roman citizen often thought that the momentary political happenings in their world were the be-all and end-all, and now we don’t even know what those concerns (or who those citizens) might have been.

Mind you, if their concerns related to the incoming Vandals and Visigoths and Huns and so on, I suppose they might have been at least somewhat justified in their belief that pivotal events were taking place.  But such times were narrow and few, relative to the “uninteresting times” in between.

Nowadays, of course, there are no actual external invaders coming in (though various propagandists might say there are).  Alas, in the modern world, we have met the Vandals, and they are us.

I almost feel that should have read “they are we”, but it might be taken as implying they are tiny, as in “they are wee”***.  Also, I wanted to throw a little homage to the famous Pogo cartoon in which Pogo originally said, “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

With that, I will call this blog post to a close today.  I hope you all remember and embrace what we’ve accomplished here (basically nothing, as far as I can tell).  I also continue to hope that you all have an objectively good day.

*Weirdly enough, the full term is “eau de cologne” which I think is French for “water of Cologne”.  This is a curious term which must be quite historically contingent.  It must also be quite exaggerated, because I very much doubt that the water in the city of Cologne has any particularly attractive and pleasant odor.  Perhaps I’m wrong.

**There was even ASD, meaning Atrial Septal Defect, on that side of the family, which I had too, requiring open-heart surgery when I was 18.  It is an interesting fact that the cardiac ASD is more common in people with the neurodevelopmental ASD, as is cavum septum pellucidum, a benign atypia in the space between cerebral hemispheres, which was found in me incidentally while I was being worked up for, I think, the cause of some then-occurring pituitary dysfunction.

***Or that they are urine, I guess, which would be a more acceptable misunderstanding.

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Fight valiantly to-day; and yet I do thee wrong to blog thee of it, for thou art framed of the firm truth of valor

270-red-boxing-gloves-vector-image-free

Good morning and Happy Boxing Day!  I hope that all of you who celebrated yesterday had a wonderful Christmas, and that those of you who celebrate Hanukkah continue to have a wonderful Festival of Lights.  For all others in the northern hemisphere, I pray that thou dost celebrate the passing of the solstice and the lengthening of daylight…and in the southern hemisphere, enjoy your summer!

For those of you who choose to celebrate Boxing Day in a twisted and quasi-literal sort of way, I remind you of this:  bare-knuckle boxing engenders fewer fatalities than does boxing with gloves, because the latter encourages far more frequent blows to the head, with consequent shaking and damaging of the brain*.  Honestly, I doubt there are (m)any who do such a silly thing, and precious few of us, with bizarre senses of humor, who even consider the possibility.  Still, just in case, I thought I’d bring it up.

And now, a quick and more or less final reminder:  My giveaway of free books (Kindle format) ends with the passing of the year (and, by some reckonings, the decade).  By the time my next regular blog post goes out, the offer will be over, so if you want to join the numerous beneficiaries of this giveaway, please, get in touch with me either here in the comments, or on Facebook or Twitter, or through some other means that will reach me, and make your request.  I will need an email address eventually, to which to deliver the link for your e-book(s), but as long as your request is sent before midnight on December 31st (according to your local time zone) then you will receive your giveaway, even if the email only follows later.

For those of you who are resistant or ambivalent because of the necessary Kindle format, I’ll simply remind you that electronic books are far more ecologically and environmentally friendly than are paper books and other physical printed media (magazines, newspapers, etc.).  This is one of the great advantages of modern electronic media, and it is far from the only one.  This blog, and squillions like it, is another.

On a related note, I’m “currently” partaking of a book in both Kindle and Audible format (at separate paces), and its subject is the potential sustainability of perhaps the most precious resource of all: the healthy duration of our individual lives.  The book is Lifespan: Why We Age—and Why We Don’t Have To, written by the eminent Harvard biologist David Sinclair, along with Matthew LaPlante.  I highly recommend it, and I’ll probably write a review of it on Iterations of Zero once I’ve finished the book in both formats.

Speaking of IoZ, I’ve posted a few things there in the past day or so.  The first was a recording of me playing a rather amateurish guitar version of “Greensleeves” aka “What Child is This?” just barely in time for Christmas.  The second was a release of two earlier recordings of a sort of karaoke and “duet” of me singing the Radiohead song “Knives Out”.  You’re welcome and encouraged to listen to all three recordings, and I’d be happy to receive your feedback.  I’m a glutton for punishment, it seems.

Unanimity editing has gotten slightly less than its usual attention of late, partly because I’ve been stricken with a flu-like illness, possibly the actual flu**, and have been relatively miserable for the past six days.  I’m on the mend, however, and though not quite back into full boxing form, I’m eager to return to the ring.  Other things, such as an office move at my job, about which I was none too happy—but with which I’m becoming more enamored—and just the general schedule derailment caused by a midweek holiday, have also intervened.  I did not edit at all yesterday.  I was too busy eating.

Nevertheless, the book proceeds more or less steadily, and publication is on the visible horizon, unless I’m falling prey to a metaphorical optical illusion.  After that, I mean to finish my novella and then publish it among other stories in Dr. Elessar’s Cabinet of Curiosities.  Then I’m going to be doing something rather more light-hearted than Unanimity, a sort of fable called Neko/Neneko, which I think I’ve mentioned here before.  That’s all assuming my plans don’t change, of course.  I didn’t have any mice helping me make those plans, so hopefully they won’t gang agley.  That’s what the quote by Robert Burns (aka “Robbie”—or perhaps “Rabbi?”) recommends against, isn’t it: men making plans with the help of mice?  It was something like that.

In any case, the holiday season is not yet over.  A New Year beckons, as does a new decade, and though great Nature recognizes not our arbitrary subdivisions of days and years and centuries and eons, such things matter to humans, of which I am one***.  So, enjoy and embrace the time.  Make merry (and possibly Pippin); indulge yourselves in ways that don’t cause harm to others or yourselves; and by all means, give yourselves some belated Christmas gifts by requesting a free copy of one or three of my stories.  We all need things to which to look forward to bolster our enthusiasm for life, after all.

TTFN

*It can hurt your hands—a lot—to hit someone in the face with bare knuckles.

**It serves me right for not having gotten my flu shot this year.  I can offer no excuses.

***No matter what I or anyone else may occasionally say.