Flying Gogoplata

The ideas in this Wired article aren’t new, at least to me. I just find it funny that they would describe it in terms of hacking. There are a lot of things that you could hack or mod, like TiVos, iPods, Linksys routers, XBoxen and other video game consoles. Using a similar metaphor one could presumably hack their body as well (the term “mod” is already appropriately used in describing body modification: piercings, tattoos, and other such things). But bacterial supplements don’t seem to me to count as hacking. And there is nothing in the article that would seem like active hacking. Probiotic treatments don’t seem any more like hacking to me than a vitamin supplement.

Of course, the article is in Wired, so it is entirely plausible (and probable) that this is their way of introducing hippie health practices to a nerd/techie audience. This seems more obvious when looking at their categorization of the article: Med-Tech – Health.

To continue both Ashley’s and my own belligerence and strife-mongering, I too would like to stand in support of alcohol. I have known about as many douchebags who smoke pot as I know dickfaces who drink. What this tells me is that it is rarely the drug of choice that makes the jerk, but rather that the jerk is so regardless of the drug.

Considering myself to be 1) neither a douchebag nor a dickface (at least under the influence of alcohol) and 2) quite fond of alcohol, I have no choice but to take public offense to Nicole’s recent comments.

That is all I have to say on the matter.

Sometimes I get a lot of surprise and pleasure from clarifying vague information from my childhood. In this case it was an odd and fairly popular song performed by The Doors called “Alabama Song”. I used to read a lot about The Doors and having noted the atypicality of Alabama Song, it stuck out in my head that it was actually a cover of a song from some sort of obscure musical. It stayed there because I never would have associated The Doors with a showtune. That information stayed in my head without my ever being able to identify the musical it came from.

Until today when I decided to continue ripping more of my CDs into digital format. The music database pulled all the relevant information from The Doors debut album, including original composer information. Listed in that column for Alabama song were Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill, one of my favorite playwrights, and two of the most important figures in Modern/Postmodern theatre. I was amazed for a minute then everything seemed to make sense. I’ve never considered Brecht and Weill’s work to be musical theatre, but rather theatre with music. So the notion of this staged song worked a bit better in a Doors cover than a showtune. Now, of course, I feel the urge to make sure to see The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, if only to hear the song as it was originally composed.

On a slightly unrelated note, I found it odd that the Wikipedia entry for “Alabama Song” has it listed as a pop standard. This notion is also very odd to me because it is difficult for me to consider Brecht “pop”. This has the same effect when I here Louis Armstrong or Frank Sinatra singing the old standard “Mack the Knife“, a song from Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera. These just don’t fit my notion of pop or showtune so my head explodes just a little when I see these labels applied to them.

I’ve counted 52 posts starting with my first post for the class on January 23rd. Waaay more than the 30 something posts Miguel claims I’ve written. I demand a recount!

Every so often I’ll look out my window and see that there is not a single light on in any of my neighbors’ windows. Then I think to myself “Is 1:38 am really well after the bedtime of the average Berkeley student?” It’s possible that this is an anomaly localized to the East Durant Massive, but even then I can’t help but feel like a night owl. And I don’t think I should.

To myself and to anyone else who may need the reminder. Always knock before walking into your friend’s room, regardless of whether their roommate told you to come down and help him with something.

Always. Knock. First.

With no offense intended towards the course or it’s facilitator, I refuse to post any overt fiction. I don’t like writing fiction, and when I do, it sucks. I was reminded of this during our first writing exercise when I started writing an intro to a zombie apocalypse piece that could go nowhere but badly, with an introduction half ripped off of Gears of War. What?

I furthermore did not sign up for a fiction workshop, rather a non-fiction blogging workshop. Now this isn’t to say that that I don’t like making shit up. I lie all the time and will probably do so in my blog in the future. It’s just that particular format that I have no interest in producing work for.

I hope you will all accept my various burst-fire rantings in place of walking into a laundromat with a dog named Jesus.

If I hear the word “cooperative” used in a coercive way one more time I swear to God I’m going to puke in someone’s face.

To Various People both within the USCA and outside:

It’s WOLF! WOLF house! W-O-L-F! Named after the fucking animal. Mother Fucking Canis lupus, of the non-domesticated variation. It’s not Wolfe as in George C. or Tom, it’s not named after a fucking person just because Wilde is.

Wolf.

You would hope that elected executives of a housing organization would know how to spell the names of the houses they serve.

I was sitting in my Animal Cognition class, listening to a lecture on animal navigation. Birds naturally take up a large part of this discussion, but also reptiles like sea turtles. It seemed odd to me at first that the word “hatch” kept getting thrown around, but on second thought it makes perfect sense that it would be so frequent. It made me think of what weird connotations are related to the notion of hatching as a form of spawning. Then I realized that there’s nothing inherently weird about hatching, as most pictures in my head of “hatching” involve adorable little yellow chicks of some variety. So the weirdness I associate with hatch must come from its use in popular culture and science fiction as the foreign and gross notion of non-placental spawning of (probably grotesque looking) sentient extraterrestrial beings. And then I realized again, and likely not for the last time, that I am a nerd.