Kablammo!

• On the minus side, they were out of Haribo Goldbären when I had a hankering for gummi bears, so I had to settle for some Happy Cola instead.
• On the plus side, there was a stray bear in the bag of cola bottles! Hooray for assembly-line screwups.
• On the minus side, Olsson’s was all out of Boulez and Stockhausen recordings yesterday, when I was eager to buy some at Maurizio Pollini’s recommendation.
• On the plus side, I got my hands on some fine Chopin works I’d been meaning to buy—and it just so happened that the Ben & Jerry’s across the street from Olsson’s was handing out ice cream cones for free.
• On the minus side, I am getting an officemate soon, so my time alone in this room is coming to an end.
• On the plus side, I moved some stuff around and snagged an extra bookcase that was lying around, so now I’m basically walled off in a little cave.

There’s probably a grain of truth to this:

Lest the value of computer searching be unduly emphasized, I would like to point out that computers have definitely not obsoleted human patent examiners. Computers cannot be made to combine references to anticipate specific inventions, although this would not appear to be insuperable. At the present time, there is no adequate approach towards the searching of mechanical inventions. I think it is self-evident that the searching of the chemical arts is a relatively easy matter compared to the searching of drawings. The underlying skeletal nature of chemical inventions, and their classification into well-recognized groupings render their searching a relatively simple matter. This is not true of mechanical inventions and in particular, complex mechanisms.

Arthur H. Seidel, Antitrust, Patent and Copyright Law Implications of Computer Technology, 44 J. Pat. Off. Soc’y 116, 123 (1962)

Then again, I don’t know much about chemistry [1], so I can’t really be sure.

In other news, sometimes it happens that I get a song stuck in my head without knowing what song it is [2]. Sometimes I’ll remember a snatch of the lyrics [3], or I’ll have some idea who the recording artist might have been [4], but just as often I won’t. The song I most recently got stuck in my head sounded like it might have been a post-Sgt.-Pepper Beatles track [5], or maybe a John Lennon solo track. Turns out it wasn’t. After weeks of increasingly halfhearted searching, I gave up. Some time later I put my mp3 player on shuffle and it spit out “I Could Spend the Day” by The Zombies, which is what I’d been looking for all along. I was happy.

* * *

[1] I may not know much about chemistry, but I do know some biology, I have a few science books, and I even remember some of the French I took.

[2] As I understand it, Paul McCartney wrote “Yesterday” by getting it stuck in his head without knowing what it was. After months and months of trying to figure out where he might have heard it or who might have recorded it, he grudgingly accepted the fact that he might have come up with it himself. So far, I haven’t been as lucky.

[3] Remembering a snatch of lyrics can be helpful, especially when what you remember also happens to be the name of the song. Unfortunately that doesn’t help all that much when what you remember is “I Do”. For the record, it’s by The Marvelows. It took quite a lot of searching for me to find it.

[4] Knowing the band isn’t very helpful when you have a dozen of that band’s albums. I mean, obviously it’s helpful since it narrows it down to a dozen albums, rather than a few hundred, but that’s still an awful lot of songs to dig through searching for a single riff that you almost thought was David Bowie at first before you suddenly realized it was CMX. (For the record, it was “Punainen nro. 6”.)

[5] Look, I do know the White Album, but my knowledge of anything past that is sketchy at best. (For the record, I think their strongest work was Rubber Soul or Revolver.) If it makes you feel any better, I’ve been meaning to familiarize myself with Abbey Road and Let It Be.

I’ve never cared in the least about the NCAA tournament, and I’ve never followed college basketball. (I attended a few Princeton games years ago, but that’s mostly just because my dad is a huge fan of Pete Carril’s system.) So I wouldn’t have entered the office NCAA pool, except that my boss basically insisted on it.

Then UConn went and lost in the first round and blew everything to hell. Thanks a lot, Huskies.

Song of the Moment: «The Chokin’ Kind» — Joe Simon

Which of these things is not like the others?

n	ñ
n	N

• I have acquired a newfound appreciation for, and understanding of, that one scene from that one Naked Gun movie and that one scene from that one Seinfeld episode.
• What’s been stuck in my head recently is a mash-up or juxtaposition of “I Do” by the Marvelows with “Walking on Sunshine” by Katrina and the Waves. The combination as I’m imagining it doesn’t quite sound fantastic, but it does at least sound coherent, and the parts of the two songs do seem to complement each other pretty well. This is more than can be said for my ill-fated mash-up of Coldplay’s “The Scientist” and Radiohead’s “High & Dry” a few years back, which nearly got me stabbed by a group of my friends.
• I’ll be attending a hearing in Federal court on Friday. Later, I should be getting my cookie supply replenished. I am looking forward to both.
• My mp3 player (well, one of them at least) smells like spices.

• One could probably instigate a riot, or at least a good deal of vitriolic complaint, by playing Bob & Earl’s “Harlem Shuffle” at a party or dance. (You’d know why if you heard it, or even looked it up on Wikipedia.) I’m sorely tempted to do so. (It’s a good thing nobody reads this blog.)
• There sure were a lot of songs whose names fit the pattern of “$verb1, $verb2 and $verb3” back in the early days of rock and roll. F’rexample:
  • Shake, Rattle & Roll
  • Jump, Jive an’ Wail
  • Flip Flop and Fly
  • Jumps, Giggles and Shouts
• Though I am not a cynic by nature [this will be the substance of a future post], I had an extremely cynical and eminently plausible realization today. For the past several months, I have been busy putting off applying to law school. Deadlines are beginning to breathe down my neck. It’s sheer idiocy to have waited so long, especially considering it’s rolling admissions everywhere, so my chances of getting in are decreasing steadily and monotonically, and have been for quite some time. I keep getting letters and emails from various law schools, offering to waive my application fee, ostensibly because I did OK on the LSAT and as an undergrad, but more importantly because I ticked a box saying “Go ahead, send me crap.” So today it occurred to me that the real reason for waiving people’s admission fees is much more straightforward, and quite cynical: US News rankings. Convincing more people to apply to your school, particularly near the end of the application window, when their chances are lower anyway, means you get to reject more applicants and thereby look more selective and give your US News stats a subtle boost.
• Speaking of which, it’s going to be a Laugh Riot when I procrastinate this so effectively that I don’t even get my act together in time to take advantage of all those offers.

• White Russian milkshakes are the best thing ever. Especially when they’re made with [redacted], which I suppose would make the drink some kind of “beige” or “taupe” Russian.
• Chai, on the other hand, is gross.
• Bubble tea, on the gripping hand, is merely OK. The tapioca ‘pearls’ can be a bit much.
• You have to eat the fortune cookie if you want the fortune to apply. Does anybody seriously dispute that?
• There was a story in last week’s Washington Post magazine about a woman who had a shoelace break. She decided to replace the shoelace instead of throwing the shoes in the garbage, and that decision was apparently worth writing a page-long story about. Is that what American consumer culture has become? Is it that noteworthy when somebody puts forth minimal effort to repair something rather than discarding it and buying a new one? For fuck’s sake.
• This whole ‘subprime’ fiasco, which would more accurately (in my decidedly non-expert opinion) be considered a ‘collateralized debt’ fiasco, reminds me of the following joke:
  

  Q. What do you get when you stir a spoonful of shit into a gallon of ice cream?
  A. A gallon of shit.

  (Apparently a lot of expert financiers thought the answer was “AAA-rated bonds”.)

• This whole ‘subprime’ fiasco also reminds me of the lesson I learned from the S&L fiasco of the 80s, which I was far too young to understand at the time but read all about in Inside Job (which I highly recommend); a lesson that was reinforced by the Enron fiasco some years back. That lesson, of course, is that novel accounting practices are Bad News. Obviously that’s an oversimplification, but should you really be able to treat hypothetical money you might get in the future as a current asset? It’s like that other joke: If you owe the bank $100K, you’re in trouble. But if you owe the bank $100M, the bank is in trouble.

Songs of the Moment: «Nouveau Western» — MC Solaar; «Bonnie & Clyde» — Serge Gainsbourg

• How can Coca-Cola justify and/or get away with asserting that they use the “original formula” for Coke, when the current formula has only been in use since 1984? That’s when they changed sweeteners from sugar to high-fructose corn syrup, which strikes me as a rather substantive, if straightforward, change. Funny, though, that Mexico still has “the real thing” while those of us in the land where Coke was born have to make do with a compromised version made necessary by the combination of ridiculous import tariffs on sugar and downright grotesque subsidies to corn growers.
• When I first tried contact lenses, it was such an amazing and wonderful experience that I couldn’t believe it. For one thing, I could see clearly—that was quite nice, but I could achieve the same result with glasses, and had been doing so since I was 8 or 9 years old. The difference with contacts was that I could see without distortion.

  Glasses, especially ones as strong as mine, introduce a good deal of distortion. Objects appear smaller, for one thing, and straight lines become curved, especially if they’re far from the optical center of the lens. And, of course, your peripheral vision is shot to hell, since you have what amounts to a patch of clarity floating in a sea of blur. No matter how big your glasses, they simply can’t correct your vision in every possible direction you can look. Even lens materials introduce their own issues. Go with a fancy lightweight plastic, and you have to put up with frankly sickening amounts of chromatic aberration. (The first time I tried plastic lenses, I had to return them to the store an hour later because the fringing literally made me sick to my stomach.) Glass is much better in that regard, and is a good deal more scratch-proof to boot, but weighs a ton, especially when your prescription is as strong as mine.

  I’d internalized all of those flaws during my ten years of wearing ever-thicker glasses, to the point that I didn’t even notice them anymore. It was, I understood, the price to be paid for being able to see things more than a few inches from my face. So it was that, upon being fitted with contacts, I felt like I’d had my eyes opened for the first time. All that shit was gone, and I didn’t have to subconsciously compensate for any of it, or worry about them falling off or slipping down my nose, or anything. I vowed never to go back to glasses, because contacts, after all, gave me a more correct view of things.

  It was years before I even got a pair of glasses at an updated prescription, because I was so averse to the glasses paradigm. Now, though, I split my time pretty evenly between contacts and glasses. I still am grateful for contact lenses for the same reasons as before, but I now appreciate glasses for their own reasons. They’re more convenient, in that you don’t need to wash your hands before manipulating them, but that’s merely an ancillary benefit. No, I now appreciate glasses exactly because of their flaws and distortions. They serve as a reminder that everything I ‘see’, my vision of the world around me, is inherently a construct of my own mind, an inference pieced together from some sensory perceptions and tinted by my own biases, assumptions and preconceptions. Glasses reinforce the fact that experience is subjective.

• Does nobody at the New York Times read Bob the Angry Flower? I mean, jeez:
  

  So it came as little surprise that Diebold, a company once known primarily for making safes and A.T.M.’s, [sic] …

• Soon I will find out whether 94.85% is sufficiently close to 95%. Fingers crossed. I could have just taken an extra hour of leave to bump myself up slightly, and in fact my supervisor just told me, “That’s how the game is played,” but evidently I like cutting things close.
• Speaking of cutting things close, there’s a lot of other shit I need to get done yesterday, that I’ve been putting off for months. We’ll see how that all goes.
• In other news, pictures from Yosemite are coming, just as soon as I stop being extremely lazy.

Song of the Moment: «Soul Finger» — The Bar-Kays

• Some people go to the bathroom after lunch and rinse their mouths out with Listerineâ„¢ brand antiseptic solution or some sort of generic equivalent. Good for them; I could probably stand to do the same. Some people bring a toothbrush and toothpaste for a more thorough cleaning. More power to them. But I just saw a guy lug an enormous electric toothbrush into the bathroom, complete with base, charger and accessories. Doesn’t there come a point when the convenience is outweighed by the hassle of carrying all that stuff back and forth? I mean, at the very least he could just leave the charger in his office and only bring the toothbrush to the bathroom, right? Or am I missing something here?
• Winter must be on its way, since my knuckles are chapped already. I guess I’m happy it doesn’t happen to my lips or something, but knuckles? How the hell does that happen? And why did it only start last year? Next time I see someone break out some ChapStickâ„¢ brand medicated lip balm or some sort of generic equivalent, I’ll be sorely tempted to borrow it from them and then rub it all over the backs of my hands. That’s bound to end well.
• I never would have imagined how alive pre-beer looks. (Or how opaque!) It’s rather fascinating to see a liquid almost violently churning for days on end, with no obvious source of movement. Those little yeast cells sure know how to live it up. It’s a shame they’ll soon drown in their own liquid waste. Delicious, delicious, hoppy liquid waste. I can’t wait to drink it.