Fried brains on Blagojevich

Well everyone, it's been an eventful week. I've been out and about almost every night and furiously working during the day on niche-ing my blog, networking with other writers, and even -yesterday- registering for a class that promises to kick my ass into gear on a book project by the end of March. I had to celebrate the registration for the class, of course, because once it starts next Tuesday I'm sure I'll be working my behind off for the next few months and won't be celebrating much of anything. So celebrate I did, and inebriation followed. And this morning, accordingly, my brain is fried.

So this post won't be worth much. But I've been reading about former Illinois Governer Rod Blagojevich getting booted from office yesterday after a unanimous vote by the state Senate. The guy has been accused of rampant corruption and general sliminess, and while many people are shocked and dismayed and disappointed, and others are probably unwilling to believe he really tried to sell Obama's US Senate seat, all I can say is:

You guys honestly expected this guy NOT to be corrupt and sleazy? Really? What on earth would make you think he'd be an upstanding guy? I have three very good reasons to suspect him of being a dirtbag without even knowing the details of the case:

1) He got his start in Chicago politics. I only lived in that city for ten months and it was made abundantly clear to me that Chicago is a seriously corrupt city. It's so racially segregated I hardly have words to describe it, and police brutality against black people is so routine it doesn't even get attention from media anymore. The entire city is located squarely in Mayor Daley's pocket - the guy is now in his SIXTH term as mayor, and his dad was mayor for 21 years. Something smell a little fishy about that? You don't know the half of it. Without going into details, let me just assert that my impression of Chicago politics is that in order to climb one's way up the ladder, one must either work one's ass off and be as perfectly upstanding and clean as humanly possible (a la Barack Obama), or, if you're like most politicians out there, you're a slimeball. Blagojevich is clearly the latter. He's even admitted it, telling the New York Times that the climate in which he made it to the top in Chicago was one of "You scratch my back, I'll scratch yours."

2) His name is ROD. I don't think I need to explain why that's a bad thing. Just say it out loud. Now, try to imagine actually calling someone that as if it's that person's name. In your mind, does that person look like the kind of guy you can trust? Probably not. My advice is this: Never trust a dude named Rod, not with keeping a secret, not with watching your pet, and CERTAINLY not with stewardship of your state.

3) LOOK at the guy! What a TOOL! How on earth did he get elected in the first place?




Seriously.

I found a niche!

That's right, folks. I've been trying to figure out a way to focus this blog so that I can... well... sell it more effectively. I'm beginning to take my writing a lot more seriously these days, and I've realized that one way to build an audience, and a name, and a style that people might find compelling enough to read if the writing leaps from the internet onto --gasp-- the printed page, is to find a niche for my blog writing. A reason for people to bookmark the blog and come back the next day to see what zany thing I've written about... whatever it is I'm writing about.

So, I've been thinking about the topics I've written on so far, and there actually seems to be a recurring theme. People being stupid. And while one could argue that basically all news stories and human activity center around this very basic function of humankind, I have a more particular kind of stupidity in mind: stupidity on such a scale or bearing such an official banner (in the name of science, government, etc.) that it gets passed off as something else than stupidity entirely. This, my friends, is the kind of moronic thinking and resulting behavior that we must all be on our guards against, for without the foresight to look at the possible results of our dumbness, we all may be doomed.

From now on, that's what I'm here for, folks. Warning us to what we're up to. Calling fouls on hair-brained ideas. Cautioning those who would jump head-first into a burbling cauldron of stupid. Watching out for you guys. Because, after all, I'm a disgrace to the forces of evil in that I DO want you all to be ok in the end. But I can't resist laughing as it all goes down.

I also hope to occasionally provide some links and humor, and kudos to art projects and other such endeavors as I see fit. Cause man cannot live on stupidity alone. Or bread, either.

Anyway, guys, I've niched! Let's get on with it!

Paranoia is really setting in.

Ok, so I know my hysterical posts about robots are probably making me look like a conspiracy theorist wack job, and I KNOW this post isn't going to help me assert that I'm actually pretty level-headed. But I think this is important, so screw the consequences. Maybe I'll niche this blog and become a conservative anti-science, anti-technology windbag. Why not?

So here's what I'm terrified of now: Immortal Jellyfish. No, seriously. I'm not kidding.

This a very small (around 5 mm high and across) jellyfish, the Turritopsis nutricula originated in the Caribbean, but has been spread around the world accidentally by being small and tough enough to survive in ship's ballast waters when it gets sucked in, then spit back out elsewhere. And, because it is biologically immortal (we'll get to that) it is of course flourishing everywhere, resulting in headlines like "'Immortal' Jellyfish Swarming Across the World". A scientist at no less esteemed an institute than The Smithsonian has called their advancement “a worldwide silent invasion”. Yeah. And they're friggin' immortal.

How they've achieved a real, true, honest form of immortality is this: somehow over time, these teensy little buggers have evolved the ability to acutally devolve. Each individual can revert to its youthful, pre-reproductive state after hving already reached adulthood and procreated. By actually changing its cells and returning to its polyp state until it decides to mature again, the creature can actually bypass death from old age - theoretically unto infinity. Theoretically forever. Unless it gets eaten, which I'm sure happens quite frequently to tiny jellyfish, this thing can outlive - well - everything.

As far as I'm concerned, this news is bordering on nightmare-inducing. Jellyfish are strange and scary enough without immortality - they are such an alien form of life to us, what with their lack of skeletons and long, often-stinging, sometimes-deadly tentacles, and the ability of some species - the most deadly, in fact - to flourish in ocean dead zones where other species cannot live, they're already akin to some monstrous nightmare Cthulu beings. And now they've achieved an even greater likeness to Lovecraft's ancient god-creature - they just don't want to die, so they've decided not to.

What terrifies me on a deeper level, though, isn't so much the idea of the jellyfish themselves and their weirdness or their evolutionary checkmate - after all, I try to avoid swimming in ocean dead zones or near giant hordes of jellyfish, so although their abundance presents a very real oceanic problem, I can hold that at a distance from my psyche. What scares me, as usual, is what WE are going to do with the knowledge we will undoubtedly try to glean from these creatures. I'm not really scared that they're out to get us, per se. The paranoia stems from elsewhere: ourselves.

Immortality, or at least extended physical youth, has been the fodnest dream of the human being for about as long as anyone knows. The world-wide anti-aging industry was estimated at $97 BILLION last year alone. If we exhaustively study these vampire jellyfish, and we already are doing so, to discover their anti-aging, wrinkle-free secrets, no doubt we will immediately begin using them to make ourselve immortal as well, or at least as close to it as we can manage. We're already working on it, and now with the example of the Turritopsis nutricula, it seems we're well on our way.

I'm certainly not saying that the idea of immortality isn't deliriously attractive. I don't know anyone, least of all myself, who wouldn't want a shot at it if it were available to be had. To live for as long as one chooses, to have no fear, to exist with more hindsight than anyone has before you... all these ideas are seductive. Who wouldn't want that chance? But. Well. Let's be honest with ourselves, about ourselves. There are far, far too many of us already. We're sucking the planet dry of its resources, polluting the crap out of everything, destroying cultures through globalization, running out of space to share with animals, destroying rainforests and every other kind of natural habitat, killing off species, and generally fucking up everything we touch. We're spewing babies everywhere and we have no decent place to put them. Now add to the already far-too-large population a race of mutant immortals who will never die to leave a little more space for those babies. And imagine that race of freaks growing larger with every generation, piling up like driftwood along a cliff as the waves of new people push them forward with nowhere to go. That'll be us. (Meanwhile, in a forward-thinking move by the genius state of Georgia, Coweta County's board of commissioners has unanimously passed an ordinance banning all products that are produced or marketed "as useful primarily for the stimulation of human genital organs", which will probably extend to prohibit the sale of ribbed/studded/other fun condoms. Because that's a good idea. But that's another blog.)

In my humble, Darwinian and naturalist opinion, global warming/climate change is the planet's way of killing off as many of us as possible, to reset the clock in the same way that the Black Death did in the 14th century and give us some room to breathe, because WE NEED IT if we want to survive. If we keep shooting out more children and defacing the planet, and refuse to die, we'll eventually just kill ourselves in some dumb way, probably nuclear war or simple toxicity. Lust after it as much as we may, I don't think immortality is strictly what we need right now. Not that what we need versus what we want has EVER stopped us before, but if I can win a few souls over to my side - the pro-dying one, yeah that'll be popular - then I'll consider myself successful.

Can I get a Hallelujah?

I'll admit, I was just as head-over-heels balls-to-the-wall batshit-insane in love with the idea of Obama becoming our President as the next media-drenched loser. I have bought T-shirts, canvas bags, and even baby onesies with his face on them. I tried to pump up friends and family to vote for him, and I did cry a little during his acceptance and inauguration speeches.

All along, I felt a slight twinge of hesitation to throw myself at his feet and offer myself up wholly to him, since after all he's just a man. And a politician at that. I couldn't necessarily put all my trust in him to do the right thing at all times, no matter how much I thought him capable of doing so. And I still hold to that - who knows what might happen and what he might end up doing? Nobody.

But. As of now. My GOD I love the man. He's been in office for almost a week exactly, and he's already being a total hardass about the environment. After years and years of watching my highest priority not just ignored but actually chucked out of the White House and by the Wayside by a bunch of ultraviolent, greedy hooligans, things are starting to move forward.

Check THIS out: Obama is pushing for higher fuel efficiency in all cars BY 2011, by telling the EPA to reconsider a request by California (which would then be followed by at least 13 other states, including New York) to "set its own rules on greenhouse gas emissions from cars and trucks"!

As was pointed out by the NY Times, this is significant for many reasons, but one that can't be overlooked is that while Bush specifically broke a campaign promise to regulate the amount of carbon dioxide put out by America, but Obama has begun his presidency "with a clear signal that he will not hesitate to use the regulatory levers provided by the Clean Air Act and other federal statutes to fight global warming."

"No single issue is as fundamental to our future as energy," said Obama. "The days of Washington dragging its heels are over." In what could be seen as a stark jab at the Bush administration's equivocal approach to climate science, Obama said, "My administration will not deny facts. We will be guided by them."

Hell yeah! Take that, all you lazy, oil-hungry sods who tried to pretend everything was coming up roses when it was actually burbling up DOOM. He takes this seriously, and it's about damn time. Tough love to all you car makers, and tough luck to anyone trying to deny what's actually happening to our environment and humanity as we keep sucking on the dried-up tit of the earth's oil resources. These attitudes are going to have to stop, or at least be buried under the avalanche of science.

I'm thrilled because Obama is actually following through - immediately - on his promises to restructure the ways in which Americans use and think about energy. He campaigned on a promise to push America toward energy independence and responsibility toward the environment, and only a week in, he's already advocated the use of $54 billion from his proposed stimulus package toward modernizing the electricity grid, pouring more into research on alternative energy sources, and building new jobs in new energy to replace the ones that will be lost in the bad economy. He's now pushing for fuel efficiency in cars driven in America



I am so jubilantly happy that I can't even write a decent blog post about this. So, sorry, that's all she wrote for today.

Why Is She Always On About Robots?

Ok, people, if you actually read all my long and rambling blogs, you already know that I have a problem with robots. I just don't trust them. I take science fiction quite seriously as I believe it expresses our deepest fears about the invasion of modern technology upon the ancient and deeply ingrained intuitive beliefs of the human being, and science fiction is forever telling us that robots are not to be trusted. It tells us that they will eventually destroy us, or find a way to dominate us completely, once we have gone too far and made them too advanced for us to control.

I believe this to some degree. People often think I'm joking about it when I mention it, but I really honestly don't think it's a good idea for us to keep making more advanced robots. Friends argue that all they're for is making our lives easier, and while I see the appeal of this (I mean, hell, I'm ever thankful for the devices in my own home that save me time, like my oven and my washing machine, etc), I don't think that we really NEED to have all our tasks taken from us. I mean, sure, it would give us more spare time if we no longer had to do our household chores because we could have the TurboMaid3000 do it for us, but then what would we DO with that time? Probably eat more donuts and watch more YouTube. Not exactly advancing the human race. (This really just belies my lack of confidence in the human race and its capabilities, but am I wrong? I mean... Look at emo kids. They have HEAPS of free time.)

Anyway, I digress. What I'm trying to say is this: be very, very careful people. Pay attention to your surroundings. I have reason to believe these damnable electronic cretins have already taken over. I think we may already be in The Matrix.

Seriously. I only say that with a very faint smirk on my face. If we're NOT already under the control of these metal-plated freaks, we need to be on guard because they're closing in on us.

Here's why: I finally got around to watching Wall-E the other day. Cute movie, really well done. I won't deny it. But maybe TOO well done, if you get my meaning. Of course, I went into the experience on my guard. I told myself: "Watch out, self. Remember, no matter how cute this little hunk of metal is, in reality this could never happen. He's a robot and he doesn't, and never could, have feelings. This is just Disney anthropomorphizing the next phase of Cute Thing, as is to be expected. Don't get all googly eyed over the cute robot. Keep your wits about you, or they'll bag you in the end."

Of course, I softened up by the end of the movie, at least allowing myself the luxury of enjoying the story and appreciating how well it was crafted. But the whole time I couldn't get out from under the strong suspicion that this was nothing but pro-robot propaganda! Someone out there was saying, more or less, "It's ok to trust robots because they are really cute, very sweet, good-hearted creatures that only want to help." In order to get this message across, howver, the creators of the movie had to blatantly lie to make what would really be a cold, lifeless yet animated junk heap look somewhat like a cubish frog with adorable eyeballs. They had to make it human. And it worked. Really well.

The pro-robot agenda in the movie is made almost undetectable by the appearance toward the end of the "evil robot" villain, Otto (I think?) who tries to commandeer the spaceship from the captain and keep humankind from returning to earth, but who is eventually defeated by the strength of the human drive to do What Is Right. This plot twist is a feint toward championing human beings' free will, as well as the possibility of robots turning bad.

But in the end, Wall-E and his adorable girlfriend Eva save the day along with the humans, and are made heroes for their valiant, emotionally-charged devotion to one another and to ... get this ... preserving Life Itself. The robots are the heroes. The robots, who are IN LOVE with each other, get humans back to earth to start over. All with the help of their robot friends, who will no doubt clean up the planet for them, because otherwise, well, that'd be a lot of work, and humans are much happier without having to do that, right?

The whole thing smacks of the movie's creators being enamored to the point of infatuation with the idea of robots, and utilizing a cute storyline together with a good grasp of human emotions (and how to manipulate them) to give people a warm fuzzy feeling toward robots. They're just there to help. Don't fear them. Etc etc. But, think about it: the characters are almost heart-attack-inducingly adorable. The story is so cute it's almost... perfect. Perfect, like a robot made it. Cold, calculating robots programmed to take advantage of our weakness - emotions - to influence us toward the robot cause. Or, just to numb us into being comfortable with robots as our masters before they pull the plug on our feeding pods and startle us into the reality of the Matrix!

I know this sounds paranoid, and I'm ALMOST joking. But, here's why I'm not. In case you've never seen Wall-E, the story revolves around a post-apocolayptic vision of Earth. A sweet little robot named Wall-E and his buddy the cockroach are the only moving things around. One day, another robot comes to the planet to look for life, and in the process meets Wall-E. They fall in love of course, but then the second robot, Eva, finds a plant and has to take it back to her spaceship to report that there is sustainable life on Earth. The plot thickens when she loses the plant, which is growing in a shoe full of dirt, and madness ensues as she and Wall-E try to find it and deliver it to the ship's captain.

Well, after watching this gooey robot love-fest, I was suspicious but willing to let it go and chalk my deductions up to my superior plot-smelling abilities, along with a bit of paranoia. But then, on my way home from where I'd seen the movie... for no reason at all... in the Bronx, on 151st St... on the street... I saw: A SNEAKER FULL OF DIRT. Just sitting there for me to see. In an area where there is no dirt, only concrete. For no reason.

I cannot see any other way to explain this phenomenon, other than that the robots who are running the world put it there to tell me: "Yes, you ARE in the Matrix, bitch. We own your ass. And nobody's gonna believe you. Hahaha, sucker!"

Oh, boy. This feels so good.

Ladies and gentlemen, in the words of the ever-wise and ever-sexy John Stewart, I give you "your Moment of Zen."

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!

Fun links for a Wednesday

Well, I haven't come up with anything groundbreaking to say, except to reiterate how much I sincerely admire and kind of have a crush on Barack Obama. What a guy. How nice is it that I can honestly say, with no reservations, that I think our President is a really great person? It feels so GOOD to say that.

Anyway, to help you get over your post-inauguration let-down blues and through hump day, here are some fun links and other goodies:

Go Around Twice If You're Happy, a public art piece in Dubai. It warms my cold January little heart.

On my favorite site, Overheard In New York, here's a funny bit from a guy who may have been trying to direct someone to my old apartment near Fordham:
Guy on cell, giving directions: So you take the D line... No, D as in "David." D! D! A, b, c, d! (pause) No, D. Okay...then you walk down to Hoffman Street... Hoffman Street, as in "Dustin Hoffman." He's that actor, with a big nose, that you really like, the one that's in that movie about your life...yeah...yeah! He's a cross-dresser! Tootsie! That's you, bro!

--Arthur Ave

Overheard by: eternal student


Here's a site for all your get-well present needs this cold and flu season: Giant Stuffed Microbes of Joy.

And, of course, a particularly humorous installment from Fuck You Penguin, a blog where the blogger tells cute animals what's what.

Well.

I'm a little unable to put up a blog post today. I was, of course, going to write about my deep and wild excitement about the fact that we not only have a new president who is NOT George W. Bush, but that we have a new president that's not Bush who is a really awesome guy. But I'm feeling a little disenchanted at the moment, since I was planning to watch the inaugural ceremonies streaming live on my computer at work, and instead was treated to chopped up sound bites and frozen pictures on my screen, no matter what website I tried to use. Seriously, throughout the ceremonies, when everyone I work with was crowded around a TV twenty feet away from me and behind a door, I was trying MSNBC, CBS, Huffington Post, Wonkette, New York One, and Hulu in succession to see if any of them would work on my ancient and grumpy computer. But none did. So I got a few good screenshots of Obama talking, each of which stuck on my monitor for a good fifteen seconds before getting replaced with a snapshot of some random person in the crowd waving a flag and two seconds of confusing noise. Ugh.

So I'm a little disappointed and way less excited than I was this morning. I'm going to wait to go home to try watching it again, this time on a better connection and faster computer. And then maybe tomorrow I'll have something to blog about.

Stupid work computer. Interfering with my experience of historical moments. Grumble.

Crap

Well I just realized I haven't blogged in two days but I have absolutely no ideas about what to write. But I only have ten minutes left of work and nothing else to do so it seems like I should write something. I really need to pick a theme for this blog and stick to it, it would narrow the field of options considerably. But that seems so limiting... Hm...

I've been surfing the interwebs all day looking at random things in between bouts of frantic copy-writing for one of the magazines I freelance for, and I've realized something. The internet, in most of its blog and list and funny pictures areas at least, is a vast wasteland populated almost entirely by people like me. People who are gainfully employed in a manner that puts them in front of a computer for at least eight hours a day, but who still have absolutely nothing to do. It's amazing. How much manpower is being wasted in this world by losers who have learned the entire LOLdictionary by heart? They make Photoshop masterpieces and post them on all sorts of sites, and then write comments about them, sometimes inventing whole new personas from which to create debate, which creates interest, which brings in more hits to their site, which... is... self-aggrandizement at its finest.

I watched the music video for Rammstein's song "Amerika," which was sent to me by a friend, and which is hilarious. Of course I'm sure they meant it as a very serious political statement about how American stupidity is taking over the world, but Rammstein as a band takes itself so seriously that one can't help but laugh at it or risk brain-explodey. But the comments! Oh, the comments! These are the people who have no creative talent with which to make things to post and then comment upon. They write things like: "whatever. britan i dont think is the best cause thats the whole reason why america exists. the whole world isnt perfect."

...

And Rammstein's point is proved!

...That really had no point to it, but it's interesting food for thought. And now my ten minutes are up and I must venture out into the Arctic Tundra that is New York City in January. Wish me luck!