90% True

.: Muxtape is a nifty website. Its barebones, minimalistic design is simple and efficient, and after fiddling with it for four hours I’m inescapably addicted. Something about the site compels a person to make as many mixtapes as they can. Here are my most recent three. See if you can recognize the theme!

Twelve Girls

• The Fratellis - Henrietta
• Killing Joke - Jana
• Van She - Kelly
• Derek And The Dominoes - Layla
• Ted Leo & The Pharmacists - Colleen
• Scissor Sisters - Laura
• The Beatles - Michelle
• Oingo Boingo - Mary
• Pink Martini - Lilly
• Elvis Costello - Veronica
• Weezer - Susanne
• Allman Brothers - Jessica

Twelve More Girls

• The Kinks - Lola
• Devin Townsend - Christeen
• Steve Winwood - Valerie
• Weezer - Jamie
• Björk - Isobel
• Gogol Bordello - Sally
• The New Pornographers - Jackie
• Chuck Berry - Carol
• Kaiser Chiefs - Ruby
• Beck - Deborah
• The Exit - Susan
• Tom Waits - Alice

Twelve Girls And A Guy

• Simon And Garfunkel - Cecilia
• Chuck Berry - Maybellene
• CAKE - Daria
• The Police - Roxanne
• Pink Martini - Veronique
• Boy Kill Boy - Suzie
• Four Seasons - Sherry
• Jonathan Coulton - Madelaine
• The Beatles - Julia
• Queen - Delilah
• A Perfect Circle - Judith
• Robert Palmer - Johnny And Mary

.: Did I leave anything out?

.: Last night I came home to an empty apartment. I had left Hobbes outside earlier in the day and never brought him in. Our front and back doors lack a cat flap, and Hobbes does not respond to any calls or cues, so the only feasible way to retrieve him is to crack open the door and wait. After propping the door open with a chair, I surfed the internets for an hour, came downstairs to see if he returned, found him lounging on the couch, shut the door, and went to bed.

.: Eight hours later, I woke up, grabbed my towel, and read The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy in one sitting. Periodically throughout the reading I was struck by a noisome smell that I thought originated from the overflowing trashcan in my room. When I finished the book, I emptied the trashcan in the dumpster outside and saw several moldy banana peels slip out along with end of semester papers and candy wrappers. Mystery solved, I thought.

.: I returned to the apartment, ventured into the kitchen which overflowed with upended beer cans and other college debris, and made my late-morning peanut butter and jelly sandwich. The stench still lingered, but I figured after pinpointing the source the problem would correct itself.

.: Nothing suspicious transpired for the next three hours. Nothing unwonted presented itself, no mysteries remained to be solved, and, but for the persisting pestilential odor, there was no reason to think I would be attacked soon by a malevolent feral hell cat from Hell.

.: Reasons to think just that accumulated very quickly. The first (and by itself convincing) reason came from my roommate who, upon entering through the front door, asked, “Cody, why is there another cat in the house?” I immediately descended the stairs with Hobbes close by, and once at the bottom I saw the creature which provoked Diego’s inquiry.

“Uhh,” I said, and the cat promptly took evasive action, meaning it jumped spastically and uncontrollably towards things which could fall over and break. Immediately Diego and I tried to corner the little beast, but its movements proved to be utterly unpredictable. It was less a cat and more an electron: we could tell how fast it was going, but at the cost of not knowing where the hell it was at any particular moment.

.: Diego’s friend Dallas assisted in the capture by wrapping her arms around me from behind and jumping frantically up and down, screaming. Diego meanwhile opened both doors in the house, much the way one rolls down the windows to provide an annoying fly with an escape route. Once I shook Dallas from my person, I grabbed Hobbes and locked him in the bathroom, lest he quarrel with the intruder and get his domesticated ass handed to him.

.: Opening the doors failed to lure the swift servant of Satan from the living room, so we decided to be more direct with our incentives. I found a longular PVC pipe inexplicably hidden behind the loveseat and handed Diego the Louisville slugger I keep between the bookcases. The cat, which by now had emptied its testicular essence over all three couches, was trapped behind the blinds of the main living room windows. Covering the blinds were two smaller flags, American and Colombian, as well as a larger, altogether friendlier Baylor standard. The whole general mishmash of cat-flags-windows-blinds made an easily accessible, if delicate, target for our pipe and bat.

.: Diego lunged at the mishmash with all the grace of an overpunched boxer. The cat was already scurrying up the window repeatedly only to fall victim to gravity every time and slide back toward the sill — now there was another variable for it to consider, irritating it further. Diego repeated his thrust, this time breaking the window with the gentlest of blows. A cat-sized hole appeared, providing a timely if not safe escape route for the mangy little bastard to leap through.

.: Throughout the fourteen hour ordeal, Martin (everyone deserves a respectable name, devil werecats included) hissed and ran and pissed at and from and on everybody and everyone and everything. Now the downstairs smells like rotten bread, the blinds are all bent to hell, the flags are riddled with claw marks, the other cat whines because we won’t let him outside anymore, and we can’t turn on the air conditioning because the intake filter is situated right by the most offensive of all catness deposits.

.: Sammy and Diego both have other places to stay tonight (just one of the many perks of having lady friends), but I’m condemned to sleep in this temporary litter box for the foreseeable future. When we run out of incense, I suppose we’ll have to find the precise locations of the cat smell, but I’ve no idea how to remove them. Any suggestions?

.: It’s that magical time of year again: May 25th, known to hoopies and froods the galaxy wide as Towel Day.

A towel, it says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitch hiker can have. Partly it has great practical
value - you can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble-sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapours; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a mini raft down the slow heavy river Moth; wet it for use in hand-to-hand-combat; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes or to avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (a mindboggingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can’t see it, it can’t see you - daft as a bush, but very, very ravenous); you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough.

More importantly, a towel has immense psychological value. For some reason, if a strag (strag: non-hitch hiker) discovers that a hitch hiker has his towel with him, he will automatically assume that he is also in possession of a toothbrush, face flannel, soap, tin of biscuits, flask, compass, map, ball of string, gnat spray, wet weather gear, space suit etc., etc. Furthermore, the strag will then happily lend the hitch hiker any of these or a dozen other items that the hitch hiker might accidentally have “lost”. What the strag will think is that any man who can hitch the length and breadth of the galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through, and still knows where his towel is is clearly a man to be reckoned with.

.: I spent the good part of the morning naked but for my towel and reading the first book all over again. It’s a rewarding experience every time, not just for the delightful story itself, but because each time I read it I understand the internet a little bit better. Chances are you know somebody whose online pseudonym was lifted from the trilogy.

.: I’m thinking tonight is the night for some Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster madness. Now just where can I get my hands on some Ol’ Janx Spirit?

.: Robin thinks he sees a pattern:

albums begin well, and end weakly. The first track on the Beatles’ Abbey Road is “Come Together”, a big winner - the last tracks are “The End” and “Her Majesty”, two unknowns. The Indigo Girls’ eponymous album begins with “Closer to Fine” and ends with “History of Us”. Phil Collins’ Face Value starts with “In the Air Tonight”, ends with “Tomorrow Never Knows”. Tracy Chapman starts with “Talkin’ Bout a Revolution”, ends with “For You”.

Joni Mitchell’s “Clouds” is a notable exception - the big winner, “Both Sides Now”, is the final track - but still. Is it that people buy based on the first N tracks? Do they?

.: I decided to test his rule against my own record collection. I’ve taken measure not to keep track of the tally while evaluating each album individually to see if it follows the rule. I’ve italicized the albums that do follow the rule bellow.

The final count was 23 out of 53 follow the rule, or 43%.

That said, I included some albums, like Yours Truly, Angry Mob and Post, which are solid but have some unfortunate track choices at the end; however, I didn’t include albums that had just as many bad songs, but spread more evenly throughout. Why that should make a difference, I don’t know, but thems the rules.

Onto the list!

Continue Reading »

.: Credit: Hunter

.: When it comes to reading novels, I’m biased towards contemporary authors. I admit this is partially due to laziness: it’s easier to identify with characters and settings when they’re imagined by an author who has all the same access to information as I do. I’m more hesitant to read a two- or three-century-old novel, because I’ll have to invest so much into familiarizing myself with the atmosphere and culture of the period. Thus, of the classic books, I read only the timeless stories which hit upon themes still relevant today (Pride and Prejudice, for example).

.: However, every now and then I’ll indulge in one of those old books that supposedly makes you a better person for having read it. Most recently I’ve cracked open Arrowsmith by Sinclair Lewis. It’s a story a medical doctor who longs to settle down and devote his life to pure research, and it was written in 1925 (!). That means the story takes place before polio was cured, penicillin was isolated, and DNA was recognized as the transforming principle. And yet it’s been a thrill to see how differently all the familiar concepts and ideas were worded back then. Lewis is a smartass of Wodehousian supremacy, and his characters are frequently uttering sublime passages that I find myself copying in my moleskine. Take this delicious spiel by the serious investigative bacteriologist Max Gottlieb, addressed to the titular protagonist:

“To be a scientist–it is not just a different job, so that a man should choose between being a scientist and being an explorer or a bond-salesman or a physician or a king or a farmer. It is a tangle of ver-y obscure emotions, like mysticism, or wanting to write poetry; it makes its victims all different from the good normal man. The normal man, he does not care much what he does except that he should eat and sleep and make love. But the scientist is intensely religious–he is so religious that he will not accept quarter-truths, because they are an insult to his faith.

“He wants that everything should be subject to inexorable laws. He is equal opposed to capitalists who t’ink their silly money-grabbing is a system, and to liberals who t’ink man is not a fighting animal; he takes both the American booster and the European aristocrat, and he ignores all their blithering. Ignores it! All of it! He hates the preachers who talk their fables, but he iss not too kindly to anthropologists and historians who can only make guesses, yet they have the nerf to call themselves scientists! Oh, yes, he is a man that all nice good-natured people should naturally hate!

“He speaks no meaner of the ridiculous faith-healers and chiropractors than he does of the doctors that want to snatch our science before it is tested and rush around hoping they heal people, and spoiling all the clues with their footsteps; and worse than the men like hogs, worse than the imbeciles who have not even heard of science, he hates pseudo-scientists, guess scientists–like these pscyho-analysts; and worse than those comic dream-scientists he hates the men that are allowed in a clean kingdom like biology but know only one text-book and how to lecture to nincompoops all so popular! He is the only real revolutionary, the authentic scientist, because he alone knows how liddle he knows.

“He must be heartless. He lives in a cold, clear light. Yet dis is a funny t’ing: really, in private, he is not cold nor heartless–so much less cold than the Professional Optimists. The world has always been ruled by the Philanthropists: by the doctors that want to use therapeutic methods they do not understand, by the soldiers that want something to defend their country against, by the preachers that yearn to make everybody listen to them, by the kind manufacturers that love their workers, by eloquent statesmen and soft-hearted authors–and see once what a fine mess they haf made of the world! Maybe now it is time for the scientist, who works and searches and never goes around howling he loves everybody!

“But once again always remember that not all men who work as scien are scientists. So few! The rest–secretaries, press-agents, camp-followers! To be a scientist is like being a Goethe: it is born in you. Sometimes I t’ink you have a liddle of it born in you. If you haf, there is only one t’ing–no, there is two t’ings you must do: work twice as hard as you can, and keep people from using you. I will try to protect you from Success. It is all I can do. So. . . . I should wish, Martin, that you will be very happy here. May Koch bless you!”

.: Certainly there are points I would quibble with, but the core idea is still around today. Seeing a passage like this in a book almost one hundred years old has done a lot to unbias me against the classics. Better yet, while researching this book I discovered one of the unlisted co-authors is Paul de Kruif, whose 1926 book Microbe Hunters was and still is regarded by many to be a classic of science writing. I’ll have to hunt down a copy when I’m done with this.