And you wonder why your parents and grandparents are so weird about sex? There's your answer. Who wants to bump uglies with a lemony-fresh antiseptic wipe?
Le Gross National Happiness
16 years ago
Showing posts with label Tidbits from the Font of Trivial Knowledge. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Tidbits from the Font of Trivial Knowledge. Show all posts
Wednesday, July 22, 2009
The Wednesday lazies...
Wanna see something that's really just wrong in every way but is still completely safe for work? You know you do! Check it:
And you wonder why your parents and grandparents are so weird about sex? There's your answer. Who wants to bump uglies with a lemony-fresh antiseptic wipe?
And you wonder why your parents and grandparents are so weird about sex? There's your answer. Who wants to bump uglies with a lemony-fresh antiseptic wipe?
Thursday, July 9, 2009
Running on fumes...
Not a lot to report on here at Chez Lynsey. I haven't found any media stories that are a) funny and quirky and interesting, or b) not way too complicated to talk about. I'd love to go into this whole CIA-has-been-lying-what-a-big-f-ing-surprise-that-is thing, but it's just so convoluted and ridiculous, and frankly, my brain has been trying to take the day off ever since I woke up, so I think I'll at least let it idle, if not turn itself off completely.
I wanted to write about this story about a Brooklyn daycare that turned out to be a front for a giant drug dealing operation (by giant I mean ten POUNDS of marijuana and around $100K in cash in the basement) but most of my talking points kept getting shut down by my brain as I thought more about it. Like, at first I was incensed by people's admonitions that having all those drugs around kids was despicable, because, I mean, c'mon it's WEED. Like, I guess I could see there being a problem if the people in charge of the kids got too excited about the book they were reading, "Mr. Bigglseworth Bakes a Pie," and then went to heat up a pre-made pie in the oven and, being high, obviously, left it in too long and caught the place on fire, but really it's pretty harmless with children.
But then I realized that the reason the operation got busted in the first place was because a gunfight had broken out there a day before, when some robbers went in to try to get the cash. So, yeah, having drugs = having cash = having people trying to rob you = having guns around kids. So, not so great. Not much of a soapbox to stand on there, Lyns.
Ummm, so there's that.
Wow, what a blog fail. Oh well.
But I DID see a guy on the subway yesterday who had his cheekbone pierced. Or something. It was wild. He had a metal stud in his cheek, right over his cheekbone. I don't know if it was like pierced into the bone, or just through the skin, or what, but it was crazy.
Oh and also, I discovered an interesting tidbit of information you might enjoy: George Clooney used to have a 300 lb pot bellied pig named Max (I've seen those giant Vietnamese pigs before - they're the ugliest sons of bitches on the planet) that shared his bed with him in the early nineties after his breakup with Kelly Preston. Turns out, Max, like other, more agile animals, could feel earthquakes coming, and woke George up early one morning in a frenzy, getting him to leave the house before an earthquake hit and ostensibly saving his life. Pretty cool, huh?
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!
Monday, January 12, 2009
Cop out
I am way too sick and full of mildly psychotropic medicines that are supposedly combatting my illness to write a blog that comes close to making sense today. And, given that last time I tried to make sense I ended up talking about Bowie Child vs. Robots in the future, I thought making an attempt in my current state would be a mistake. Perhaps hilarious, but it would get nobody anywhere in the long run.
So instead, I'm taking the opportunity that having my sinuses feel as if they're going to pop my eyeballs out of my head and my lungs hurt with each breath I draw to do what some of my favorite other bloggers do, and guide anyone who reads this to some other interesting websites. I get a lot of ideas and inspiration from some of these, so I thought maybe others would, too.
1) Firstly, on a somber note. If you like seafood, which I know most of you do, or sushi, or anything from the ocean, you should be aware that most of our fish stocks worldwide are being overfished and fish in really destructive manners. I just watched a British documentary last night called "Deep Trouble" about how badly depleted our once-thriving ocean is becoming, and how it's our responsibility as consumers to find out how the fish we eat was caught and where it comes from. But it's hard to make responsible decisions about what we purchase without first knowing what's ok and what's not. So,here is a link to the Monterey Bay Aquarium's Seafood Watch Guide . The people here keep a close watch on fish stocks in the wild and on fishing practices world-wide, and keep their site up to date on what types of fish are ok to eat and which are not in the area where you live. I'm sure their info isn't 100% accurate, because depending on where you're buying, you could be getting fish from any number of fisheries and markets and so on, but it's a good start. You can even order a wallet-sized card with a guide appropriate to you region on it, so you can keep a list of what's ok and what's not with you at all times, making spur-of-the-moment sushi forays less morally confusing!.
2) On a more entertaining note, NPH hosted SNL on Saturday! Hooray for initials, and the for the internet making it completely ok for me to use them and expect people to understand what I'm saying! I was really considering getting up at 4:00 am to wait in line for ticktes, but I got drunk instead and ended up sick from a cold too, AND Had to be at work at 10:00 am, so I didn't make it. But go to Hulu for some good clips.
3) Any of you who are responsible YouTube watchers or internet trollers have no doubt already seen Drunk History , but if you haven't yet, go check it out. It's entertaining and yet slightly disgusting in a perfect balance. There are a lot of homehade ripoffs out there, though, that ARE gross, so try to be prudent with your link-clicking.
4) Of course, if we're going to venture into YouTube territory, there has to be an obligatory Cute Animal installment. I used to be quite against the Cut Animals on the Internets phenomenon, but as the days here at the gallery have dragged ever onward and I have gotten more and more bored, I've become ok with. Animals are funny. Especially the ninja cat .
5) And, to make your day a little brighter, there's scientific proof (or at least a study showing that perhaps it's true) that fat butts are an indication of good health! True story!
So instead, I'm taking the opportunity that having my sinuses feel as if they're going to pop my eyeballs out of my head and my lungs hurt with each breath I draw to do what some of my favorite other bloggers do, and guide anyone who reads this to some other interesting websites. I get a lot of ideas and inspiration from some of these, so I thought maybe others would, too.
1) Firstly, on a somber note. If you like seafood, which I know most of you do, or sushi, or anything from the ocean, you should be aware that most of our fish stocks worldwide are being overfished and fish in really destructive manners. I just watched a British documentary last night called "Deep Trouble" about how badly depleted our once-thriving ocean is becoming, and how it's our responsibility as consumers to find out how the fish we eat was caught and where it comes from. But it's hard to make responsible decisions about what we purchase without first knowing what's ok and what's not. So,here is a link to the Monterey Bay Aquarium's Seafood Watch Guide . The people here keep a close watch on fish stocks in the wild and on fishing practices world-wide, and keep their site up to date on what types of fish are ok to eat and which are not in the area where you live. I'm sure their info isn't 100% accurate, because depending on where you're buying, you could be getting fish from any number of fisheries and markets and so on, but it's a good start. You can even order a wallet-sized card with a guide appropriate to you region on it, so you can keep a list of what's ok and what's not with you at all times, making spur-of-the-moment sushi forays less morally confusing!.
2) On a more entertaining note, NPH hosted SNL on Saturday! Hooray for initials, and the for the internet making it completely ok for me to use them and expect people to understand what I'm saying! I was really considering getting up at 4:00 am to wait in line for ticktes, but I got drunk instead and ended up sick from a cold too, AND Had to be at work at 10:00 am, so I didn't make it. But go to Hulu for some good clips.
3) Any of you who are responsible YouTube watchers or internet trollers have no doubt already seen Drunk History , but if you haven't yet, go check it out. It's entertaining and yet slightly disgusting in a perfect balance. There are a lot of homehade ripoffs out there, though, that ARE gross, so try to be prudent with your link-clicking.
4) Of course, if we're going to venture into YouTube territory, there has to be an obligatory Cute Animal installment. I used to be quite against the Cut Animals on the Internets phenomenon, but as the days here at the gallery have dragged ever onward and I have gotten more and more bored, I've become ok with. Animals are funny. Especially the ninja cat .
5) And, to make your day a little brighter, there's scientific proof (or at least a study showing that perhaps it's true) that fat butts are an indication of good health! True story!
Friday, December 12, 2008
Afternoon malaise
Holy cow you guys, my stupid blogging knows no bounds. And my boredom is deeper than the blackest of seas. And my mood is blacker still. The neverending stream of stupid people who cycle through the gallery is continuing unabated today. I must hve told at least ten people that the Desiderio show isn't here today. And at least five that we don't have a bathroom. And at least five more that I don't speak Spanish, or French, or whatever-the-hell-else language they were speaking. It took me two hours to eat my lunch because of the constant interruption of dumbasses in person and on the phone, and damned if I didn't get some mystery meat in my bimibop. Or however you spell it.
If I were a praying person, I would pray for the patience to get through today, but I am not.
Instead, I write.
About nothing, apparently.
Ah, well then, let the observations of people and happenings in New York continue.
There is a grey man who comes into the gallery sometimes. Yesterday was I think the fourth time I've seen him, and I recognize him each time despite my terrible memory because he is grey. All of him. Grey. His skin is pewter colored. The first time I saw him was last winter on a particularly cold day, and he had a bike helmet in his hand. His skin was almost shining and looked silver, and I could only think that he might have had on some sort of skin-protecting silver lotion, like zinc oxide, all over his face to protect him from the cold. But then he came in again, while it was warm out, and he looked the same.
I mentioned it to a few people, and they suggested that maybe he was one of the Blue People from Kentucky. I researched it (online, of course) and discovered that there was indeed a family in Kentucky, in days of yore, that had an extremely rare congenital condition called methemoglobinemia. About a quarter of them were blue skinned. Caused by a combintion of recessive genes, this condition comes about when the blood is not able to carry enough oxygen, and as a result turns brownish blue, leaving white sufferers with a blue appearance. The condition is treatable, but extremely rare.
Methemoglobinemia can also be acquired by ingesting certain types of chemicals in oxidizing drugs, some antibiotics, local anasthetics, and others.
I'm assuming my Grey Guy has one form of this condition. Otherwise, the only conclusion I can draw is that he is indeed dead and reanimated. For a zombie, though, he knows an awful lot about sculpture.
If I were a praying person, I would pray for the patience to get through today, but I am not.
Instead, I write.
About nothing, apparently.
Ah, well then, let the observations of people and happenings in New York continue.
There is a grey man who comes into the gallery sometimes. Yesterday was I think the fourth time I've seen him, and I recognize him each time despite my terrible memory because he is grey. All of him. Grey. His skin is pewter colored. The first time I saw him was last winter on a particularly cold day, and he had a bike helmet in his hand. His skin was almost shining and looked silver, and I could only think that he might have had on some sort of skin-protecting silver lotion, like zinc oxide, all over his face to protect him from the cold. But then he came in again, while it was warm out, and he looked the same.
I mentioned it to a few people, and they suggested that maybe he was one of the Blue People from Kentucky. I researched it (online, of course) and discovered that there was indeed a family in Kentucky, in days of yore, that had an extremely rare congenital condition called methemoglobinemia. About a quarter of them were blue skinned. Caused by a combintion of recessive genes, this condition comes about when the blood is not able to carry enough oxygen, and as a result turns brownish blue, leaving white sufferers with a blue appearance. The condition is treatable, but extremely rare.
Methemoglobinemia can also be acquired by ingesting certain types of chemicals in oxidizing drugs, some antibiotics, local anasthetics, and others.
I'm assuming my Grey Guy has one form of this condition. Otherwise, the only conclusion I can draw is that he is indeed dead and reanimated. For a zombie, though, he knows an awful lot about sculpture.
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