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My Career As A Stand-up Comic vb
A few years ago we were at a live comedy night. The emcee offered a short open mike segment. I lept upon the stage and said:
"The other day I read in the newspaper that the Chilean Government was requesting the extradition of General August Pinochet for trial for torture and human rights abuses during his regime. Pinochet was in a hospital in London, England. His laywers requested that the British Government deny the extradition request, on the grounds of... humanitarian reasons."The audience response was a handful of confused giggles. That was my career as stand-up comic.
Science Corner #1: Brain Food sm
These delicious cookies were half-baked by an advanced Home Eco-Neuro-Nomics class at MIT. Students, who have completed prerequisite studies in Mechanical and Bio-chemical Engineering, designed and manufactured detailed cookie cutters based on the physical shapes of their own brains. But these aren't just funny shapes! When a cookie is eaten, a fascimile strand of the designer's DNA is downloaded into the consumer's sytem. The new strand operates on a pre-conscious level, influencing new cell development. Professor Angela Fleance, one of the world's leading Home Eco-neuronomicists, and designer of the project, commented, "It's not like eating one of these cookies will morph your brain into the chef's brain. You would have to eat at least two dozen cookies from the same recipe, before you'd see anything like a clone structure emerge."
Word of the Day #1: Faience vb
Faience is my favourite word for tin-glazed earthenware pottery. That A I E umlat thang is so sexy. References to pottery creep up in the work of Philip K. Dick in Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said and of course The Galactic Pot-Healer. The latter book also included an unearthly premonition of The Babel-Fish Game, the use of flawed computer-generated language translations programs to create texts like this:
There are only ten of us and there are ten million fighting somewhere in front of you, so get your onions up and we will throw up the truce flag. Oh, please let me up; Leo, Leo! Oh, yeh! No, No; I don't...please! Please shift me. Police are here; communistic...strike...baloneys...Please; honestly it is a habit I get; sometimes I give it and sometimes I don't. Oh, not; I am all in; say... that settles it. Are you sure? Please, he eats like a little baloney sausage maker. Please, let me get in and eat. Let him harass himself to you and then bother you. Please... Don't ask me to go there; I don't want to. I still don't want him in the path. Please, Leo, Leo; I was looking for someone. Meet my lady, Mrs. Pickford, and I'm sorry I acted that way so soon, already. Sure, it is no need to stage a riot. The sidewalk was in trouble and the bears were in trouble and I broke it up.
Science Corner #2: Nature Wins sm
It seems as if the nuture/nature debate has finally drawn to a close. Three of the worlds leading scientists, synaptics expert Orville Bags, philosopher Barbara Bennet, and linguist Steven Sweeter, have jointly released the findings of an interdisciplinary experiment proving once and for all that nature rules. "Contrary to popular belief," says Sweeter, "all of the world's people are culturally very similar. It's their genes that make some of them better than others." In the study, which was fast-tracked to produce timely results, a sample of the world's peoples were tested for performance abilities in several areas such as IQ, sports and co-operation. "The results were all over the map," explained Bags, "but since we drew all the subjects from the same housing complex we knew that environment wasn't a factor. Instead we hired a medical imaging techican to give us a graphical interpretation of each subject's genetic code, rendered in conté chalks. Then, under carefully controlled conditions, we photocopied each of the drawings many times, so that the images broke down. The genetic codes that showed the least degredation matched the individuals with the highest performances, 5.2 times out of 10. Admittedly our sample group was small, we could only include results from 8 participants because someone spilled coffee on the zerox machine, nevertheless we feel confident that our results prove conclusively that strong genes are the most direct link to human success."
Scientists and Social Engineering experts rejoiced at the news. Population Control Consultant Douglas Romsfeld expressed his pleasure at the World Conference on Ethical Expendability last month at the Rwanda Hotel. "We've been waiting a long time for news like this, it almost seems too good to be true. Respected world governments come to us everyday looking for justifications for this or that policy, action, or lack of action. Now we can offer concrete evidence that some people are inherently expendable so we can shut up these whiners, like this Cindy Sheehan or whatever her name is "Why did you kill my son, why did you kill my son." My god, I'll tell you why lady, cause your son was almost as useless to us a you are! You see? Before this paper came out, I wouldn't have been allowed to say that in public! This is a great day for the ruling class. I mean, the white ruling class."
100 Best English Language Novels vb
We note with interest Time Magazine's recent feature: Lev Grossman & Richard Lacayo pick the 100 best English language novels of the last 80 years. (Note: this is propably the first time in ages we have noted anything interesting in Time Magazine). Best Of (more accurately: "Favourite Picks") lists are chock full o'subjectivity and tons of fun to argue about. I tend to agree with most of the people who have seen Time's list that it actually is not that bad, as far as these lists go. The list even includes PKD's novel Ubik. I think it is good that they included PKD, but I recall Ubik being one of his weaker books. (There, now I have just spent the last hour fumbling online, looking for PKD fan's survey rating their favourite PKD novels, but I couldn't find it again. Oh well). I vaguely recall that Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep and Man in The High Castle rated fairly well. My persoanl favourites are Flow My Tears and A Scanner Darkly. The latter is soon to be released as an animated movie by Richard Linklatter in the rotoscoped style of Waking Life. Sounds neato.
Update: we saw the movie version of A Scanner Darkly. Sure is trippy!
Science Corner #3: Nerd Mob Rules sm
Scientists usually choose to settle their disputes in the theoretical arena, out-thinking one another and, when possible, providing testable proofs. In recent and unprecedented events, over 600 respected scientists participated in three simultaneous violent and unlawful riots, two in England (London and Yorkshire) and one at Columbia University, NYC. Three men, apparently the victims of a carefully coordinated attack, escaped with minor injuries. Rupert Sheldrake, a biologist known for his experiments on dogs that seem to anticipate their masters' arrivals home, was sipping tea with his wife in their London flat when a brick flew in through the window. Angry scientists broke into the apartment and, allowing Mrs. Sheldrake to cower unimpeded in the corner, delivered a massive wedgie on her helpless husband's underpants. "I had no idea there was a mob descending on my home!" He later exclaimed to the British press. Four minutes earlier that same night amateur physicist and sheep farmer Julian Barbour was walking home across one of his fields when a group of scientists bearing torches and chanting "End-of-Time-My-Ass, End-of-Time-My-Ass" thundered down upon him, snatching his best tweed cap right off his head and tossing it into a nearby bog. Said Barbour, "The incident is frozen in my memory forever. The trauma is so terrible, I'm afraid I'll never be able to move beyond this moment." Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, the widly popular and charismatic string theorist Brian Greene was talking animatedly with a group of adoring young students in the grad lounge at Columbia University when 450 enraged scientists stormed the building and surrounded Greene for several hours, during which time they took turns grinding their knuckles into his lush-haired scalp, one nougie for every dimension that string theory, could it ever be tested would require. Says one rioter who refused to be named, "Those guys were really bugging us."
Salamanders and Newts: Hellbender vb
The Hellbender (Cryptobranchus alleganiensis) is the featured Reptile or Amphibian of this Issue. It is indubitably cool by virtue of it's name alone, but also because it maintains it's gills into adulthood. This critter hangs out in the Mississippi basin, and the Ozarks, like them thar hillbillies, after whom their distinctive musical stylings are named, in Billboard Magazine, before more enlightened times. A cousin of this critter eventually managed to invade the world in Karel Capek's novella, 'Invasion of the Newts'. Not to be confused with the decadent Roman Emporer Helioglabus. Salamanders of this sort are reputed to live in fire. Although they are harmless, do not trust them.