I weep for our future

One of the tragedies of today’s plugged-in world and its many distractions is that our young people grow up without a solid grounding in the key touchpoints of our shared heritage and ignorant of the contributions of the great people who have gone before us. I am referring of course to Tarzan. He is largely forgotten now, his early accomplishments dimmed by a series of disastrous business decisions, shady underworld connections, and a final decade as an embittered Tastee-Freez proprietor. His portrayal in the media as a shirtless goon who habitually stabs lions to death has further tarnished his legacy.

Quitters

Let me get this straight. You’re a loyal capo, a good soldier. You do whatever the boss says. He says hit ‘em, you hit ‘em. You break the legs, you collect the vig, you take your cut. You circle the wagons, you rally the troops. Drink the Kool-Aid? Hell, you help mix it. Then the last big job goes very bad and the whole rotten operation starts to fall apart. Obviously, you’re all busted. So now you say you’re quitting the gang? And that makes you a good guy? Forget it. When a big zit pops, the pus runs out.

copy that

There is no excuse for lamb and feta sliders. The whole beauty of White Castle is that a sack of their little burgers costs something like five bucks and they are exactly the thing they are. Trying to make them “classy” is condescending and dumb. And it misses the whole point, like a custom shop Telecaster going for $20,000 when Leo Fender’s original idea was to mass-produce a factory guitar. “A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking.” Andy Warhol said that.

Look, all I ever promised was 100 words.

Here’s a sentence I never thought I would find myself typing: A team of scientists in Hoboken have developed technology that creates entangled photons 100 times more efficiently than previously possible. Let’s take a moment to reflect on what this might mean for the future of quantum computing. Now let’s all acknowledge that while this is seriously cool science news, the inclusion of the phrase “in Hoboken” adds an inappropriate yet undeniable element of dopey humor. Also, the word “acknowledge” looks so funny when you type it out that I had to spell-check it twice. Okay. That’s all I got.

Your Monday Boggle

You’ve no doubt heard about the rare conjunction in our skies of the gas giants Jupiter and Saturn, two well-known planets famous for such interesting features as spots and rings, respectively. They’re just lining up from our perspective, of course, not actually getting close. I looked it up – they are about five times as far from one another as Earth is from the Sun. Also, Jupiter and Saturn together contain over 90 percent of the planetary mass in the solar system. So, they’re real far part, and they’re real big. In comparison, the largest omelet ever made contained 145,000 eggs.

Also, a bug up my butt.

I hate to keep harping on this but it’s been a thorn on my side and a bee in my bonnet for an awful long time now which is the failure of hovercraft to ever deliver on their potential to be our cool futuristic transportation technology of tomorrow. What can be said of a culture that allows the pioneering early work of such giants as Thornycroft and Cockerell to languish fallow and neglected but that we had greatness within the span of our grasp and blithely frittered away their priceless legacy. I should have ordered the plans from Popular Mechanics.

absolute zero

so me and gus and phil were sitting around talking about what we might compose next and gus said he’d go cage one better and write a piece with four minutes and thirty-four seconds of silence but phil said you’re missing the point he said i’m going for four minutes and thirty-two seconds which yeah that was okay until i said i’d just composed a piece called 00:00 which was absolute silence for a period of no duration whatsoever which was so good that we just sat there for a moment and listened to it an infinite number of times