Bang and Whimper

Today was a day I really could have (and would have) used a shoulder to cry on. Thank you, World, for not allowing me such a crutch. I’m sure, in some mysterious and indescribable way, I’m a better man for being alone. And I’m sure that, years down the road when the sun shines for a day on my life, I will look back upon today as a turning point or a genesis. Because, after all, that’s the sort of irrational and idiotic faith in the nature of nature that we’re taught as small, irrational and idiotic children to adopt, and who am I to disagree? Nobody, that’s who. Nobody.

  Of all things tired thy lips look weariest,
Save the long smile that they are wearied of.

Swinburne, from Hermaphroditus

NP: silence, finally

[Photo courtesy sherdog.com]

Look carefully at the man on the left, because you will be seeing a lot more of him. His name is Bob Sapp, also known as “The Beast” [birth year 1974, silly]. He had short stints in the WCW and IWC after playing football for the Raiders and the Bears. Now Sapp is, quite simply, the biggest star in Japanese Mixed-Martial Arts Prize fighting—both physically and commercially. He is 6′5″ [or 6′3″, there are mixed reports] and 356 lbs. of solid muscle. He was on Leno the other day. On Friday he KOd Kimo at the Battle at the Bellagio. Mike Tyson was watching in the front row; when the match ended, Tyson jumped into the ring and Tyson and Sapp challenged each other to a match. Tyson wants to fight Sapp. Sapp wants to fight Tyson.

Why should you care? I dunno, maybe you shouldn’t. But I care. I went to junior high and high school with Bob Sapp (he was a year ahead of me). I just yesterday found out about his relative stardom. I knew he went NFL, but hadn’t heard much else until yesterday (thanks, Katie!).

When I was young, my friends and I used to sit around playing Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out on the old Nintendo, joking about how crazy you’d have to be to step into the ring with Iron Mike. Now, a guy I know might actually do just that. Insane!

But the real reason I care is not that I can claim some derivative accolades from knowing someone famous, but because Bob Sapp yearbooks are selling like hotcakes, and I have four of them. I’m guessing that the guy trying to sell his for $100,000 is bound for serious disappointment. But I’m not asking for $100,000. I’ll sell mine for a tenth of that.

Any takers?

…

Other people of note from my high school: the Fuzzy Carrot Nipples. Because dead chicks are great, and so is getting drunk.

NP: The Decemberists, A Cautionary Song

As if it weren’t already apparent that Coldplay is the Best Band Ever™:

Today, as my roommate was flipping through the channels on the idiot box, he paused briefly on VH1, where we caught in medias res Coldplay’s video for The Scientist. It was filmed backwards, but I noticed that Chris Martin seemed to be singing along with the lyrics.

<aside>
It reminded me of a song on the Trash Can Sinatras’ most recent compilation, Zebra of the Family. The guys were fooling around in the studio, running the tapes for Iceberg backwards, so they recorded Francis trying to sing along with the backwards tape, and then reversed the recording. I imagined Chris Martin having to do something similar for the video.
</aside>

ANYWHO, I persuaded Teague to let me watch the rest of the video, which turned out to be quite a sublime little number, and an excellent complement to the song. The best part, though, was that the very end of the video features a brief appearance by Elaine Cassidy, who, as of this writing, just happens to be the Best Girl Ever™.

I first saw Elaine in a made-for-TV movie called The Lost World, which was based on a story by Arthur Conan Doyle. The movie was surprisingly enjoyable; particularly so due to the presence (ah, the double entendre!) of Elaine Cassidy. She was wonderful. She also stars in Felicia’s Journey, a movie by Atom Egoyan (The Sweet Hereafter). Definitely next on my viewing list…

But Coldplay is rad for far more than the actresses they employ in their videos. They’re planting mango trees in Bangalore, and they were the highlight of the otherwise overwhelming :bleh: HFStival of 2001. And the music. Can’t forget the music.

NP: Coldplay, See You Soon

This is why I’m loving my Linux box. Well, and this. And this. And this. And…

That, and it’s free.

NP: Gene, Olympian

I haven’t been able to do much writing lately. Partly I have been working far too much, and, perhaps related to this condition, I have been in extremely low spirits for several months. What little time I have devoted to any serious personal pursuit has been spent almost exclusively on trying to gather material for a large essay on a single topic that has held my focus for more than four years. A complete essay is a long way off, and I’m not sure it will ever be reproduced here. I’m still not certain that the materials I have gathered or what I have to say about them could possibly interest anyone else. The pathological nature of my own interest seems to argue against it. I may, however, from time to time offer small snippets of some of the supporting material, to keep it fresh in my own mind and step. Today, I recall section 192 from Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil:

192

Whoever has traced the history of an individual science finds a clue in its development for understanding the most ancient and common processes of all “knowledge and cognition.” There as here it is the rash hypotheses, the fictions, the good dumb will to “believe,” the lack of mistrust and patience that are developed first; our senses learn only late and never learn entirely, to be subtle, faithful, and cautious organs of cognition. Our eye finds it more comfortable to respond to a given stimulus by reproducing once more an image that it has produced many times before, instead of registering what is different and new in an impression. The latter would require more strength, more “morality.” Hearing something new is embarrassing and difficult for the ear; foreign music we do not hear well. When we hear another language we try involuntarily to form the sounds we hear into words that sound more familiar and more like home to us: thus the German, for example, transformed arcubalista, when he heard that, into Armbrust. What is new finds our senses, too, hostile and reluctant; and even in the “simplest” process of sensation the affects dominate, such as fear, love, hatred, including the passive affects of laziness.

Just as little as a reader today reads all of the individual words (let alone syllables) on a page—rather he picks about five words at random out of twenty and “guesses” at the meaning that probably belongs to these five words—just as little do we see a tree exactly and completely with reference to leaves, twigs, color, and form; it is so very much easier for us simply to improvise some approximation of a tree. Even in the midst of the strangest experiences we still do the same; we make up the major part of the experience and can scarcely be forced not to contemplate some event as its “inventors.” All this means: basically and from time immemorial we are—accustomed to lying. Or to put it more virtuously and hypocritically, in short, more pleasantly: one is much more of an artist than one knows.

In an animated conversation I often see the face of the person with whom I am talking so clearly and so subtly determined in accordance with the thought he expresses, or that I believe has been produced in him, that this degree of clarity far surpasses my powers of vision: so the subtle shades of the play of the muscles and the expression of the eyes must have been made up by me. Probably the person made an altogether different face, or none at all.

—From Walter Kaufmann’s translation of Beyond Good and Evil by Friedrich Nietzsche

NP: The Transplants, Tall Cans in the Air

Pardon me while I indulge in just a touch of wistful self-loathing, made beautiful by my dear friend Miss Emily Brontë:

I am the only being whose doom
No tongue would ask no eye would mourn
I never caused a thought of gloom
A smile of joy since I was born

In secret pleasure—secret tears
This changeful life has slipped away
As friendless after eighteen years
As lone as on my natal day

There have been times I cannot hide
There have been times when this was drear
When my sad soul forgot its pride
And longed for one to love me here

But those were in the early glow
Of feelings not subdued by care
And they have died so long ago
I hardly now believe they were

First melted off the hope of youth
Then Fancy’s rainbow fast withdrew
And then experience told me truth
In mortal bosoms never grew

’Twas grief enough to think mankind
All hollow servile insincere—
But worse to trust to my own mind
And find the same corruption there

Thank you, Emily. I shall always treasure the times we spent together.

NP: Taking Back Sunday, Cut From The Team

Not that it matters much, but I spent tonight making a few small but nifty changes to the ol’ website. First, I added a “robots.txt” file to tell spiders and crawlers which pages should be indexed. You won’t notice any difference as a result, of course (unless you happen to be one of said spiders/crawlers…), but it sure will clean up my referrer logs, which tend generally to be a big mess of 404s.

In a further effort to clean the logs, I have also added the all-important “favicon.ico” icons to my pages. If you are accessing my pages using Internet Explorer, you are unlikely to notice any change, unless you bookmark my page. Netscape 6+/Mozilla and Opera users (as well as Safari, I believe, though I need to check on that) should see a small JokeofAllTrades icon in the address bar of their browser (if the bar is displayed), and as an added bonus it should match the selected skin/color scheme for the site. Pointless? Yes, of course. But moderately fun for me, and no trouble for you.

NP: Pineforest Crunch, Situation Endless

I find the dynamics of internet meme popularity fascinating. Something explodes onto the scene, sort of plateaus in popularity, and then it hits a secondary market of sorts—a whole new population that missed it on the first go-round—and it takes off again.

The latest of these to hit my inbox first arrived almost two months ago. It was a simple request to go to Google, type in “Weapons of Mass Destruction” and hit the “I’m feeling lucky” button. Up pops a page that looks like the standard Internet Explorer “This page cannot be displayed” page, but with some added social commentary (the effect is naturally somewhat diminshed for those of us who don’t use MSIE all the time). I hesitate to create another link to this thing, but if you must see it, you can find it here.

Strangely, this thing has shown up in my inbox almost 10 times in the past week. Normally, the only email I get is spam, but this has been coming from friends. I do appreciate the thought, that you wanted to share with me a laugh, or at least a dolorous smile and shaking head. Really, I appreciate it. I can only say, though, at this point: message received. No need to send me another message telling me to Google “Weapons of Mass Destruction.”

I should also probably clear up some seemingly common misconceptions. First of all, the page to which the message refers has nothing to do with Google. It’s a piece of satire written by a guy who maintains a website about adverse drug reactions. Second, he wrote it months ago. Now, it’s everywhere.
If, by chance, it is (or was) the first page that Google returns on that particular search, it has gotten there entirely because certain people keep sending other certain people to that page, and certain people keep linking to it, etc.

If you want to know what memes are “fresh” and what aren’t, there is help. Good places to look include Memepool and Boing Boing and, you know, Google.

</vent>

On an entirely different note, I think I’m teetering on the edge of insanity. All I can say is, “Ooh, the pretty colors!”

NP: The Decemberists, Grace Cathedral Hill

On Saturday night, the hard drive on my server melted down. For the most part, this wouldn’t be an issue, since everything is backed up nightly, but I did lose everything I updated during the day on Saturday and any (heh—joke at my own expense to follow) comments that anyone might have left.

Of course, Saturday was the day I had chosen to write large amounts of wildly interesting things and to add several new and fascinating links to my links page. All gone bye-bye.

In place of all that I have lost, I can only substitute a few paltry neat-o links I was able to remember, since I am currently on lunch at work, and I’ve been here since 7:00 a.m., and I was up quite late last night working, and I’m too tired to give you anything requiring thought on my part.

Still, these are pretty swell links. Adam Felber is a frequent panelist on the NPR game show Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me!. Turns out, he’s also a blogger. Funny, too. He’s also running for president.

Also, see Dreems for loads of fun. For some reason, it reminds me of Shel Silverstein.

NP: Edith Frost, Wonder Wonder

I went to a Starbucks today; I hate their coffee, but I live in an “upscale” neighborhood, which means that Starbucks is the only place one can go and sit for awhile without spending $40 on drinks. I finished my book, finally, but not without considerable distraction; I know I am fundamentally a loner, even a bit afraid of other people, but I still (still!) can’t help watching longinly as cute girls pass within my field of view. My heart breaks a hundred times a day. It’s juvenile, this attachment to others, the desire for beauty and love, the belief in “love” as an abstract entity, the hope for companionship and empathy and common interest, but I simply can’t shake it. At my root, I am thus juvenile. I still fight the urge to dislike everyone I encounter, even if they blow smoke in the faces of the people behind them, even if they walk three abreast on a narrow sidewalk, even if they drive without signalling or stopping at stop signs, even if they spit on the sidewalk, or walk their dogs in the public park, or smell bad, or yap incessantly and insipidly with their loud and stupid companions, or do any of the myriad little things that don’t quite qualify as crimes but nevertheless reveal the depth of inconsideration and frivolty of the general public. I still desperately want not to hate them, not to despise them, not to find them in contempt of all that is or could be beautiful in humanity. But I have yet ever to meet, face to face, another human who shares any of my greater sympathies, who has read Chamfort (or even heard of Chamfort), whose spirit soars with mine when discussing the development of institutions for the betterment of mankind, who understands and desires and loves like I do. I have never met anyone with whom I could discuss any of the things I hold most dear in the world.

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