Ok guys. I want to write stuff, but... Well... Here's where I am right now, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually:
...so I'm not getting much done. Bowie is pretty overwhelming.
Le Gross National Happiness
16 years ago
Showing posts with label DAVID BOWIE. Show all posts
Showing posts with label DAVID BOWIE. Show all posts
Wednesday, January 13, 2010
Tuesday, August 11, 2009
Thursday, June 25, 2009
David Bowie = Macaulay Caulkin + Nick Frost < Mark Sanford
Laziness is setting in... This week has been unaccountably long so far and quite busy and I'm starting to feel my energy level drop out from under me. Rather than losing it entirely by pushing myself too hard, here are some bits of awesome I've found scattered about on the cluttered floor of the Internetz.
1) From Overheard In New York:
Random hipster: If David Bowie had wheels, how much would you pay to ride on him?
--St. Mark's Place
(You guys know my answer to that question.)
2) I have to find a way to watch this show somehow, even though it airs in Britain. A sample question for the contestants:
Q: Macaulay Culkin is a child, but can you name an adult?
A: This was not as easy as it seemed, as the only acceptable answer was Tom Petty.
3) Speaking of British shows I love, check this out:
4) Taking a break from laziness, can I please just take a moment to ask why this story about South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford having an affair is such a big deal that it warranted front page placement in both the NY Times and Wall St. Journal (and probably many others - those are just the only 2 papers I see in physical paper form every day)?? Every time another politician admits to having had an affair, and the media goes crazy, and people start acting as if this is a HUGE story like Atlantis has fucking surface from the bottom of the ocean and our understanding of the world has irrevocably changed, I just scratch my head. I mean... Oh my gosh, somebody is having an AFFAIR? Well, isn't that novel. Oh, wow, and it's a POLITICIAN? Who knew politicians, those upstanding and morally unimpeachable pillars of the community, could have affairs? Isn't it shcoking?
....No, no it's not. LOTS of people have affairs, and politicians have probably more than average. Isn't this common knowledge by now? How many political sex scandals have to break per week for us to get this through our heads? Holy crap, people, calm down. Why should what a governor does with his dick have to have ANY impact on what he does for his state and constituents? I just... I don't get it. Can't we focus on something pertinent to something, please?
/end grumbling
Monday, May 18, 2009
Fun on the internets!
Ah, Mondays in the city. People are either angry that it's Monday, discussing their crazy weekends with friends, or sleeping off hangovers. And the internets are abuzz with things I am just now seeing after not reading much last week because I was writing DVD reviews like mad. So, here are a few tidbits to make you laugh:
During my lunch hour today:
1) As I was walking down 55th Street after buying some coffee in Dunkin Donuts (an adventure in itself, after I'd gotten into a kind of confused staring contest with a homeless man outside who said something in gibberish to me and then refused to repeat himself, but instead just smiled at me while I blinked at him), some really loud young men decided that they should walk DIRECTLY behind me and talk very loudly. This is what they said:
Dude #1: Yeah, I'm talking about my SCROTUM.
Dude #2: Yeah, just to be clear.
Dude #1: My nutsack.
(Pause...)
Dude #1: Man, I've got to go back to that strip club.
2) Later on, as I was walking down 5th Ave, I heard two men discussing homeless people when we walked by an old babushka looking panhandler (who I later saw stuff her bills into her pocket to make it look as if she wasn't making any money... sneaky...):
Man #1: Homeless people are interesting...
Man #2: They can make a good bit of money doing that.
Man #1: I'd imagine.
Man #2: No, I mean it! There used to be this man who would ride on the 2 train with me every day. He had a skateboard and he would push himself up and down the cars on it, as if he had no legs. And people would give him a LOT of money, cause he had no legs. But then, he would get off the train every day at South Street Seaport, and STAND UP -
Man #1: Stand up?
Man #2: Yeah, he'd stand up on his LEGS and walk to his car and go home.
3) And later on still, on 56th Street as I was heading back to work, I passed a gay looking thug-type man who was saying to the girl he was with:
"That fucking ignorant fuck! That illiterate fucking fuck!
I was impressed by his use of expletives.
Meanwhile, over the weekend and in some cases last week, these things were happening on the internet:
1) David Bowie meets Tim Burton meets Colonel Sanders - in chicken form!
2) Take a good look at all three of these photos, people:
-
-
-
Now, imagine little old me at a Man Man show, getting all riled up by the music and finally getting up the gumption to jump into the moshpit nearby. And immediately getting SLAMMED to the floor by a huge, sweaty, almost-naked body...
Turned out, that "most pit" wasn't a mosh pit at all. It was just that guy flinging himself around in nothing but a headband and underpants. And he flattened me.
Good times.
3) If you click on this photo:
...there's more where that came from. Jesus is WITH YOU ALWAYS and don't you forget that next time you're looking at porn online, people.
During my lunch hour today:
1) As I was walking down 55th Street after buying some coffee in Dunkin Donuts (an adventure in itself, after I'd gotten into a kind of confused staring contest with a homeless man outside who said something in gibberish to me and then refused to repeat himself, but instead just smiled at me while I blinked at him), some really loud young men decided that they should walk DIRECTLY behind me and talk very loudly. This is what they said:
Dude #1: Yeah, I'm talking about my SCROTUM.
Dude #2: Yeah, just to be clear.
Dude #1: My nutsack.
(Pause...)
Dude #1: Man, I've got to go back to that strip club.
2) Later on, as I was walking down 5th Ave, I heard two men discussing homeless people when we walked by an old babushka looking panhandler (who I later saw stuff her bills into her pocket to make it look as if she wasn't making any money... sneaky...):
Man #1: Homeless people are interesting...
Man #2: They can make a good bit of money doing that.
Man #1: I'd imagine.
Man #2: No, I mean it! There used to be this man who would ride on the 2 train with me every day. He had a skateboard and he would push himself up and down the cars on it, as if he had no legs. And people would give him a LOT of money, cause he had no legs. But then, he would get off the train every day at South Street Seaport, and STAND UP -
Man #1: Stand up?
Man #2: Yeah, he'd stand up on his LEGS and walk to his car and go home.
3) And later on still, on 56th Street as I was heading back to work, I passed a gay looking thug-type man who was saying to the girl he was with:
"That fucking ignorant fuck! That illiterate fucking fuck!
I was impressed by his use of expletives.
Meanwhile, over the weekend and in some cases last week, these things were happening on the internet:
1) David Bowie meets Tim Burton meets Colonel Sanders - in chicken form!
2) Take a good look at all three of these photos, people:
-
-
-
Now, imagine little old me at a Man Man show, getting all riled up by the music and finally getting up the gumption to jump into the moshpit nearby. And immediately getting SLAMMED to the floor by a huge, sweaty, almost-naked body...
Turned out, that "most pit" wasn't a mosh pit at all. It was just that guy flinging himself around in nothing but a headband and underpants. And he flattened me.
Good times.
3) If you click on this photo:
...there's more where that came from. Jesus is WITH YOU ALWAYS and don't you forget that next time you're looking at porn online, people.
Thursday, January 22, 2009
Life on Mars
So I'm really not doing very well with the blog ideas lately, but darned if I'm not at least trying to come up with entertaining (if not exactly well written or researched) entries. Today is no exception, but I have forced my bored and underutilized brain to put a few strands of thinking together to actually back up an idea I've had for a long time but never was able to give any flesh to. Ahem:
There's been much media hype recently about methane found in Mars' atmosphere by NASA probes. The presence of methane on the planet, according to what I've read, is significant in and of itself because, as one blogger put it, "Methane is not stable in Mars’ atmosphere: it goes away rapidly. So there must be a source of it that is making methane now, actively." Furthermore, the presence of the gas detected seems to change from time to time and from place to place, meaning that whatever is producing it is also changing, possibly according to seasonal/rotational/what-have-you changes on the planet.
Pretty exciting. Of course, the media is in a frenzy, putting headlines like "Life on Mars" on publications and implicating "alien bugs" farting and other such unsubstantiated nonsense. And for the time being, these wild allegations are just that: nonsense. Methane can be made in a number of different ways, and with what we know so far about Mars (which, let's remember, is extremely little) there are plenty of options as to how a gas that's associated with volcanic and biological activity on Earth could be produced on a very different planet. Volcanoes, at least as we know them, are right out, since the other gases released in volcanic eruptions and such haven't been found on Mars, but there's still a lot to learn about how their geology differs from ours. Aside from volcanoes, however, there's plenty we don't know about the chemistry taking place under the surface of the planet, and the chance that methane could be being produced by the interaction of other substances that we haven't been privy to just yet. And, of course, there is the remote but very real possibility that there is some form of living being burping and farting and decaying away somewhere on Mars in substantial enough numbers to be contributing its gaseous waste to the atmosphere.
Most scientists and science enthusiasts out there are quick to caution us that the biological option is the least likely to be true, given that there is very little and very salty water (in the form of ice) on Mars. And it has long been held that life is only possible where there is abundant oxygen and water, as there is on Earth. Scientists have acknowledged that perhaps life is possible in other conditions, but given that we would know very little about how that would work, it's safest not to hypothesize.
I say, why WOULDN'T life be able to exist in other conditions, and the very vastness of our universe seems to point to that idea. Granted, we haven't found it yet, but we've been spending our time looking for it exclusively on planets like our own, under the assumption that it can't exist elsewhere.
I understand the need to narrow down the search, since we can't well try to examine every planetary object out there, but I think limiting ourselves to the idea that life is only possible on Earth-like bodies is, well, limiting. Who says there's not some species out there on some dark rock that exists entirely by consuming plutonium? WE don't know. We're making a very rigid and binding set of assumptions that, despite all our resarch and speculations, we know virtually nothing about. And those assumptions are based upon our own experiences, which take up a fraction of the experiences available in the universe so small it probably can't even be calculated. Those assumptions, therefore, statistically speaking, have to be considered ridiculously invalid. They're like a baby assuming that everything in the world is fuzzy, because its eyesight hasn't yet developed fully, or like a deep sea fish assuming that all the world is darkness. Not necessarily bad assumptions, but still completely WRONG.
And here's the thing: we should know better. Not so very recently, scientists have discovered living organisms living ON EARTH completely independently of the sun, in the absence of water, and even with very limited access to oxygen! If they can live HERE under such circumstances, why would they not be able to do so elsewhere?
Seriously.
Entire communities of species hitherto unknown to science have been found - long ago enough to have been filmed by BBC film crews and subsequently studied - living in the deepest parts of the ocean (The Mariana Trench near Guam, and on extremely deep-water "volcanos" spewing superheated water into the ocean) and in caves completely cut off from sunlight. Some quite advanced living creatures have been found in these supposedly inhospitable environments, surviving on colonies of bacteria that subsist on acids and sometimes even rock. They did not depend on reliable sources of oxygen or sunlight, and some went without water entirely. Not exactly our idea of normal life, but it exists, right now, on our very own planet, which just goes to show what we know.
So, let's say things on Mars are very different from here. WE couldn't live there. But there's nothing -NOTHING- to say that nothing can.
So, basically, all I'm trying to say is that David Bowie is in fact right, there IS Life on Mars, and he knows it because he is actually a god from outer space.
Hah! Betcha didn't see that coming!
There's been much media hype recently about methane found in Mars' atmosphere by NASA probes. The presence of methane on the planet, according to what I've read, is significant in and of itself because, as one blogger put it, "Methane is not stable in Mars’ atmosphere: it goes away rapidly. So there must be a source of it that is making methane now, actively." Furthermore, the presence of the gas detected seems to change from time to time and from place to place, meaning that whatever is producing it is also changing, possibly according to seasonal/rotational/what-have-you changes on the planet.
Pretty exciting. Of course, the media is in a frenzy, putting headlines like "Life on Mars" on publications and implicating "alien bugs" farting and other such unsubstantiated nonsense. And for the time being, these wild allegations are just that: nonsense. Methane can be made in a number of different ways, and with what we know so far about Mars (which, let's remember, is extremely little) there are plenty of options as to how a gas that's associated with volcanic and biological activity on Earth could be produced on a very different planet. Volcanoes, at least as we know them, are right out, since the other gases released in volcanic eruptions and such haven't been found on Mars, but there's still a lot to learn about how their geology differs from ours. Aside from volcanoes, however, there's plenty we don't know about the chemistry taking place under the surface of the planet, and the chance that methane could be being produced by the interaction of other substances that we haven't been privy to just yet. And, of course, there is the remote but very real possibility that there is some form of living being burping and farting and decaying away somewhere on Mars in substantial enough numbers to be contributing its gaseous waste to the atmosphere.
Most scientists and science enthusiasts out there are quick to caution us that the biological option is the least likely to be true, given that there is very little and very salty water (in the form of ice) on Mars. And it has long been held that life is only possible where there is abundant oxygen and water, as there is on Earth. Scientists have acknowledged that perhaps life is possible in other conditions, but given that we would know very little about how that would work, it's safest not to hypothesize.
I say, why WOULDN'T life be able to exist in other conditions, and the very vastness of our universe seems to point to that idea. Granted, we haven't found it yet, but we've been spending our time looking for it exclusively on planets like our own, under the assumption that it can't exist elsewhere.
I understand the need to narrow down the search, since we can't well try to examine every planetary object out there, but I think limiting ourselves to the idea that life is only possible on Earth-like bodies is, well, limiting. Who says there's not some species out there on some dark rock that exists entirely by consuming plutonium? WE don't know. We're making a very rigid and binding set of assumptions that, despite all our resarch and speculations, we know virtually nothing about. And those assumptions are based upon our own experiences, which take up a fraction of the experiences available in the universe so small it probably can't even be calculated. Those assumptions, therefore, statistically speaking, have to be considered ridiculously invalid. They're like a baby assuming that everything in the world is fuzzy, because its eyesight hasn't yet developed fully, or like a deep sea fish assuming that all the world is darkness. Not necessarily bad assumptions, but still completely WRONG.
And here's the thing: we should know better. Not so very recently, scientists have discovered living organisms living ON EARTH completely independently of the sun, in the absence of water, and even with very limited access to oxygen! If they can live HERE under such circumstances, why would they not be able to do so elsewhere?
Seriously.
Entire communities of species hitherto unknown to science have been found - long ago enough to have been filmed by BBC film crews and subsequently studied - living in the deepest parts of the ocean (The Mariana Trench near Guam, and on extremely deep-water "volcanos" spewing superheated water into the ocean) and in caves completely cut off from sunlight. Some quite advanced living creatures have been found in these supposedly inhospitable environments, surviving on colonies of bacteria that subsist on acids and sometimes even rock. They did not depend on reliable sources of oxygen or sunlight, and some went without water entirely. Not exactly our idea of normal life, but it exists, right now, on our very own planet, which just goes to show what we know.
So, let's say things on Mars are very different from here. WE couldn't live there. But there's nothing -NOTHING- to say that nothing can.
So, basically, all I'm trying to say is that David Bowie is in fact right, there IS Life on Mars, and he knows it because he is actually a god from outer space.
Hah! Betcha didn't see that coming!
Thursday, January 8, 2009
Two posts in one!
Ok, the most important issue of the day today, obviously, is:
1) IT'S DAVID BOWIE'S BIRTHDAY!! He is 62 years old. As most of you probably know, I have a serious obsession with the man. I can't explain why or how it developed, but I think it has something to do with my love of the movie Labyrinth from a very early age, which introduced me to his sparkly nature, his awesomely sexy accent, and the gigantic... er... talent... that is displayed when he wears very tight pants. As I got older I started to listen to his music and realized that he does indeed rock my world in every possible way. The man has been ten years ahead of the curve musically since the late sixties, pioneered the glam rock movement, and I'm pretty sure actually is an alien living among us. He married supermodel Iman, who I think is also an alien, and their super-perfect babies will rule the earth someday, I'm sure.
He is older than my parents. But I would still say yes if he asked me to marry him, or spend the night with him, or let him eat sushi off my body, or... well... anything. That would be after I either wet myself or just made a fool of myself generally by blathering stupidly about the weather for twenty minutes or some-such, just because he had spoken to me. Yes, I may have a problem, but at least I am honest about it.
So, everyone, please go home tonight and listen to your favorite Bowie song, and lift a glass to the man that has had more influence on modern music than most of us realize, who was sexy enough to be probably the only man ever caught naked in bed with Mick Jagger, who can wear tights and sparkly eye makeup and still be sexy, and who could probably turn you into a bowl full of jelly with one piercing, two-toned look from his creepy/sexy eyes, and who, weirdly enough, has not yet made it into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. (Madonna has, and although I like Madonna, I think she should have told them she refused to accept her spot there until they put him in. Cause, I mean, she'd be nowhere without him... But that's another blog.)
2) And the second thing I want to bring up here is not quite as important to me at the moment, but will probably be a bigger eveny than Bowie's 62nd birthday in the long run. The iPod people will soon market the iBreath. A breathalyzer for your iPod. (http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-idrunk19-2008dec19,0,3073178.story)
This seems like a good idea on a very, very altruistic level. The guy who thought up the idea, Don Bassler, calls it a safety device that "may save lives." He told the LA times that "the hope is that the iPod's cool factor will take away some of the stigma of acting responsibly and using a breathalyzer," which is all well and good. But...
Well...
Let's be honest with ourselves here. Who uses iPods the most? Who are the most tech-savvy people out there? What group of people finds out about new gadgets and must have them as soon as possible? And who goes to parties and follows peer pressure to drink heavily to the point of critical intoxication? Who are generally inexperienced and naive enough to think that they can handle anything and that nothing bad can ever happen to them? The answer to all these questions is the same: image-conscious high school and college students who have lots of their parents' money to spend.
Given what we know about the implied target demographic for the iBreath, then, what is the likelihood of that demographic using this device for good instead of for getting as wasted as possible? Sure, there will undoubtedly be a few responsible honor students out there who keep the iBreath safely in their pockets or by their steering wheels, but the majority of drunken high school and college students I've known in my day would be much, MUCH more likely to sit in a circle chugging jungle juice and seeing who can blow the highest reading before passing out, vomiting, or having their stomachs pumped. (For an in-depth description of the evils of hand-held breathalyzer devices in the past, please refer to Tucker Maxx and his "Famous Sushi Pants" story: http://www.tuckermax.com/archives/entries/the_famous_sushi_pants_story.phtml)
Thank goodness others have followed the same reasoning as myself: "Laura Dean-Mooney, national president of Mothers Against Drunk Driving, said she worried that young people would use the breathalyzer for drinking games." I'm not alone in my fears, then, but when was the last time that MADD actually had an effect on the youth drinking culture?
All I can say is, I'm worried, people. As if the iPod and the iPhone weren't already sinister first waves of a frightening trend away from human interaction and the use of the brain that will inevitably lead to our downfall when robots take over the world with their superior ability to follow orders unscrupulously and their inability to make errors (so what if I'm conservative about technology?), now we're all going to become DRUNKEN drooling morons who can't leave the house without being plugged in to fifteen gadgets. We're making ourselves easier targets for the robots here, people.
That is, of course, unless we allow the Bowie Alien Child to rule us all, in which case I'm sure we'll be in good hands. Judging from the formidable might of the Bowie-Iman alliance already, their offspring will probably have the necessary technology and genius, and of course the sparkles, necessary to defeat the robots.
Oh my GOD. I just re-read what I've been writing. I'll stop now.
1) IT'S DAVID BOWIE'S BIRTHDAY!! He is 62 years old. As most of you probably know, I have a serious obsession with the man. I can't explain why or how it developed, but I think it has something to do with my love of the movie Labyrinth from a very early age, which introduced me to his sparkly nature, his awesomely sexy accent, and the gigantic... er... talent... that is displayed when he wears very tight pants. As I got older I started to listen to his music and realized that he does indeed rock my world in every possible way. The man has been ten years ahead of the curve musically since the late sixties, pioneered the glam rock movement, and I'm pretty sure actually is an alien living among us. He married supermodel Iman, who I think is also an alien, and their super-perfect babies will rule the earth someday, I'm sure.
He is older than my parents. But I would still say yes if he asked me to marry him, or spend the night with him, or let him eat sushi off my body, or... well... anything. That would be after I either wet myself or just made a fool of myself generally by blathering stupidly about the weather for twenty minutes or some-such, just because he had spoken to me. Yes, I may have a problem, but at least I am honest about it.
So, everyone, please go home tonight and listen to your favorite Bowie song, and lift a glass to the man that has had more influence on modern music than most of us realize, who was sexy enough to be probably the only man ever caught naked in bed with Mick Jagger, who can wear tights and sparkly eye makeup and still be sexy, and who could probably turn you into a bowl full of jelly with one piercing, two-toned look from his creepy/sexy eyes, and who, weirdly enough, has not yet made it into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. (Madonna has, and although I like Madonna, I think she should have told them she refused to accept her spot there until they put him in. Cause, I mean, she'd be nowhere without him... But that's another blog.)
2) And the second thing I want to bring up here is not quite as important to me at the moment, but will probably be a bigger eveny than Bowie's 62nd birthday in the long run. The iPod people will soon market the iBreath. A breathalyzer for your iPod. (http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-idrunk19-2008dec19,0,3073178.story)
This seems like a good idea on a very, very altruistic level. The guy who thought up the idea, Don Bassler, calls it a safety device that "may save lives." He told the LA times that "the hope is that the iPod's cool factor will take away some of the stigma of acting responsibly and using a breathalyzer," which is all well and good. But...
Well...
Let's be honest with ourselves here. Who uses iPods the most? Who are the most tech-savvy people out there? What group of people finds out about new gadgets and must have them as soon as possible? And who goes to parties and follows peer pressure to drink heavily to the point of critical intoxication? Who are generally inexperienced and naive enough to think that they can handle anything and that nothing bad can ever happen to them? The answer to all these questions is the same: image-conscious high school and college students who have lots of their parents' money to spend.
Given what we know about the implied target demographic for the iBreath, then, what is the likelihood of that demographic using this device for good instead of for getting as wasted as possible? Sure, there will undoubtedly be a few responsible honor students out there who keep the iBreath safely in their pockets or by their steering wheels, but the majority of drunken high school and college students I've known in my day would be much, MUCH more likely to sit in a circle chugging jungle juice and seeing who can blow the highest reading before passing out, vomiting, or having their stomachs pumped. (For an in-depth description of the evils of hand-held breathalyzer devices in the past, please refer to Tucker Maxx and his "Famous Sushi Pants" story: http://www.tuckermax.com/archives/entries/the_famous_sushi_pants_story.phtml)
Thank goodness others have followed the same reasoning as myself: "Laura Dean-Mooney, national president of Mothers Against Drunk Driving, said she worried that young people would use the breathalyzer for drinking games." I'm not alone in my fears, then, but when was the last time that MADD actually had an effect on the youth drinking culture?
All I can say is, I'm worried, people. As if the iPod and the iPhone weren't already sinister first waves of a frightening trend away from human interaction and the use of the brain that will inevitably lead to our downfall when robots take over the world with their superior ability to follow orders unscrupulously and their inability to make errors (so what if I'm conservative about technology?), now we're all going to become DRUNKEN drooling morons who can't leave the house without being plugged in to fifteen gadgets. We're making ourselves easier targets for the robots here, people.
That is, of course, unless we allow the Bowie Alien Child to rule us all, in which case I'm sure we'll be in good hands. Judging from the formidable might of the Bowie-Iman alliance already, their offspring will probably have the necessary technology and genius, and of course the sparkles, necessary to defeat the robots.
Oh my GOD. I just re-read what I've been writing. I'll stop now.
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