Math is Funny Like That

Did you ever stop to wonder just who comes up with all the statistics we're forced to absorb on a daily basis? Well I did, and what I discovered will shock you...

Wait, what's that?

Sorry, you're going to have to hold that thought. This is interesting.

Anybody know where I can find 716,009 spiders?
I want to try something...

The Results are in...

That's right, friends, the totals from Super Tuesday are in and counted, and we can now say with authority that the winner is...

...whichever itinerant alien race gets here first.
I don't know about you people in the rest of the world who, for reasons of culture or currency, are relatively insulated from the collective American psyche, but I for one think we're long overdue for an inter-special changing of the guard. I say we've done damage enough to this unassuming little world, and we ought to let someone else have a go at it for a while. They can scarcely do worse, can they? Less than 200,000 years since any ancestor we would readily recognize on the street appeared, and already we've had centuries of war, genocide, and ritual bloodletting, as well as multiple seasons of American Idol and many other unfathomable cruelties. But not to ourselves alone have we restricted our destructive tendencies. According to one reliable estimate that I just made up, as many as four hundred species worldwide become officially endangered or extinct each day, roughly a third of which are consumed by the McDonald's Corporation alone. Even the earth itself has not been immune to our pestilence. We've pilfered the forests, poisoned the air, befouled the deeps of the sea, raped the soil for its riches, and erected innumerable grotesqueries on the face of the world--not by far the least of which is New Jersey. Moreover, we leave one of our most advanced, powerful, and influential civilizations in the care of a man who routinely requires Secret Service assistance to interpret the cartoons in his Sunday newspaper. So I ask again: Could any theoretical interstellar interlopers conceivably do worse were they to have run of the place?
To illustrate, let us play devil's--or alien's, as the case may be--advocate. Let's you and I assume for a moment that extraterrestrial lifeforms did in fact come to colonize the earth. What then? To answer this question, we need to make a few assumptions. First, let us assume that the alien visitors are native to some world outside of our immediate stellar neighborhood. Based on what Mr. Drake has to say on the subject, this seems a very fair assumption. Secondly, we will assume that, as they managed to come here in the first place, they--or at least some members of their civilization--must be significantly more technologically advanced than are we. Thirdly, let us assume that they have come here intentionally; that is, they have traveled here with a specific purpose or intent, rather than having simply wandered by on their way to somewhere else. This implies forethought, reconnaissance, and planning. This is also an arbitrary assumption, but let us make it anyway. The correlation of these two assumptions logically suggests a fourth, which is for our present purposes irrelevant but interesting nonetheless. If these are significantly advanced beings who decided at some point to bend their technological might to making the long journey to earth from their homeworld even after they knew what it was like here, then we may safely assume that they are a highly masochistic species. If we take as given that their presence on earth is purposeful, what might that purpose be? Curiosity seems a solid motive, for even though an advanced civilization must set a high stake on the extravagancies of interstellar travel, surely only a highly developed sense of intellectual fervor could lead them to their advanced state. After all, curiosity is the forbear of science. So we might say that they are here because they wish to find out...
Find out what? Perhaps to find out what sort of geological formations our planet possesses, or then again maybe to find out whether or not we taste good with breakfast. As I see it, what they wished to find out is immaterial. The heart of the scientific method, regardless of the nature of the heart of the scientist, remains the same: Observation. It doesn't seem unreasonable to assume that they could observe us without our knowledge if they so desired. If they did so, then we would never know we were the object of their scrutiny. Given that scenario, our lives would continue unchanged. In fact, this may very well be going on right now. You know, that bush outside is a little closer to the house than it was yesterday...
If we discount pure science--which is likely just as rare in the alien species as it is in our own--we must then assume that they are curious in a much more...shall we acquisitive manner. Much like the intrepid explorers in earth's past, they might come in search of revelry, of rarities and riches with which to return to their distant homes. Or perhaps it is in fact a home they seek. This notion brings--or so I should hope--to the reader's mind a number of possibilities:

"What if they kill us all simply because they don't understand us?"

"What if they use their superior technology to force us to live like they do, and worship their heathen alien Gods?"

"They might take away our planet because they like it better than theirs."

"They might not want to stay here, but would instead herd us onto giant intergalactic vessels and indenture us for the rest of eternity in their equivalent of a salt mine."

..to which I can only say, "Hmm. How about that?"

So then let us construct a final, implausible, worst-case. The aliens have indeed come bent on making our world their home with or without our cooperation. Having come prepared to defend themselves, they are more than capable of besting any attack we, the lesser technological entity, can mount. We are then swept away with little fanfare to one of the remoter corners of the biosphere, where, presenting little if any threat to the usurpers, we are allowed to eke out whatever miserable existence we might until such time as we annihilate ourselves in a fit of petty bickering--no doubt precipitated by something highly pertinent, such as whether or not Howard Stern should have been removed from Clear Channel Radio. Or, if we survive long enough to make some feeble showing of political presence again, we may in time be allowed certain minor ambassadorial discourse with the new overlords. They, being the mightier, compel us to take on a somewhat subservient role in their society, something of a satellite civilization. Eventually, if we are this lucky, we end up under the total and unflinching domination of inscrutable creatures who barely--if at all--speak our language and demonstrate little understanding of or concern for our needs, desires, general wellbeing, etc. We are subjected to mandates we cannot hope to comprehend, and, in all likelihood, are forced to pay heartily for the privilege.

Come to think of it, how would this scenario present any major change?


This is all fine and good in jest, but I'm not naive enough to believe that the total domination of the human race by aliens would be a pleasant thing. I simply mean to convey that the total domination of the human race by other humans is not necessarily any more so.
But seriously, though, alien invasion is, if not an immediate peril, at least a plausible notion, at least in America. Don't take this to mean that I believe America to be any more likely a spot for invasion. I simply mean to say that such a thing is more plausible in America. After Curious George W.'s rationale for war in Iraq passed public scrutiny with barely and eyelash flutter from Jane and John Q. Public--and their bastard son, Sam--I'm convinced that we'll swallow anything. I can just hear the Conservatives--they of the shaved-head, hyper-Nationalist, Nazi-jackbooted, hound-dog-and-a-basement-bunker variety--now:

"If we don't go out of our way to make welcome these esteemed extraterrestrial visitors of ours, with their vastly superior weapons and technology, you can bet the Terrorists will!"

Rockin' Ebola; Split-end Blues; et al.

Finally, musicians are playing actual instruments again. Synthesizers are all fine and good, and I personally love the theremin, but there's a line that should never have been crossed: electronic drum kits. Logistically, it's almost infinitely more complicated to design and manufacture a hunk of electronics that simulates simple percussion than it is to build a drum. That's just inefficient. Besides, isn't there something fundamentally satisfying about banging away on some big ol' drums with little wooden sticks? And it's not as though the synthetic drums sound particularly impressive. If you're going to waste biomechanical energy beating on stuff, you may as well take the trouble to do it right...

You know the only thing that would be more imminently enjoyable than watching cobbled-together robots beating the bloody hell out of each other? Watching cobbled-together robots beating the bloody hell out of my Roomate. I'm generally a pacifist, but this guy's a real ass.

I was in a local store today, and I chanced to wander into the section devoted to hair care products. Apparently, it is not only possible to curl my straight, fine hair, but to condition the pores in my scalp, maximize the moisture balance in my assorted follicles, and even--I know, I couldn't believe it either--finally put an end to the abysmal terrors of protein deficiency. I didn't know I had a protein deficiency, but it must indeed be severe if its ill effects have spilled over to my coiffure. You know what I like in a shampoo? I know this must sound like a radical, even dangerous idea, but I like a shampoo with the ability to clean my hair. If I wanted herbs and nutrients in my hair, I'd put a steak on my head and roll about on the lawn.

If I see one more puppet cavorting about my television screen issuing geysers of simulated excreta, I fully intend to...
Come to think of it, what in Hell can be done about this? I welcome any suggestions.

Note to Self: If Pres. George W. can frolic around waging war on nebulous intellectual concepts such as the ones governing Terrorism (punctuation his, not mine), then I declare an immediate commencement of hostilities against midlife angst, daytime TV talk shows, and that weird crud that forms on the tops of toothpaste tubes. Oh, and the color yellow. I never did like yellow.

The Masked Logician is lazy and very, very surly. Comments, cash, and secrets of immortality welcomed.

I used to have this nightmare, see...

...where I'd be alone inside this desiccated hulk of an early-eighteenth-century farmhouse on the property where my grandparents lived when I was young. Once there I could always expect to be visited by some supernormal malevolency the like of which would bring a tear to the eye and a quiver to the bladder of Robert Englund himself. On more than one occasion, I can recall, in the infinite wisdom of the dreaming unconscious, fervently hoping that some leprous abomination would skitter the most revolting of its many appendages from the darkness under the bed and lay hold of my ankles and draw me down into the unflinching embrace of eternity as I slept so that I might be reprieved from my own imagination. Not to say, mind you, that anything I saw and/or suffered in the course of these somnolent sojourns was any more or less than the meat and bread of the day's Hollywood gore machinery. It simply seemed as though my pre-adolescent sensibilities were unequal to the task of coping with anything even tenuously connected with this humble, moldering former residence. Always, in the sober, Joe Friday light of morning the despicable things I recalled--fortunately few--would utterly fail to shrivel to shrieking fantasy death as did my other nocturnal frights. No indeed, even still some of the latent imagery from those dim childhood nightmares, burned into the phosphor screen of an overactive imagination, come back to me on nights darkest and most still. All of which amounts, as they say, to precisely dick, I suppose. And in further supposition, the fact that, lacking any prompting or discussion of the subject from myself, my pseudonymous beloved, upon spending some few minutes in the environs of this particular dream-specter's real-life counterpart, came down with what can only be called a righteous case of the heebie-jeebies must also be discounted as meaningless--indeed totally insubstantial--coincidence.
On a similar note, don't you hate it when you dribble gelatinous melted cheese onto a clean shirt? And even if the shirt is not, according to the strictest empirical definition, precisely clean, as such, at such time as the cheese makes contact with the fabric, well, that's still pretty lousy, right? Unlike less viscous substances, a cheese spill cannot be absorbed by a napkin or blotted away with a towel. Moreover, even if the bulk of the cheese is removed promptly, there always remains behind a troublesome residue of unwholesome dairy substance that attracts not only the attention of those individuals lucky enough not to be so endowed, but ever dust particle within approximately three parsecs of your current location, creating, after a time, a stiff, Bakelite-like layer of gunk on your poor abused garment that, once dried, will not be removed by anything less than a religious rite.

Alright, I realize that the two topics are not in any way related. But then, if you wanted coherence and relevance, you wouldn't be here.

I'm Deraming of a White Tax Season

Ok, so I was wrong...
It snowed today. Quite a lot; and will in all likelihood continue to do so well into the afternoon tomorrow. To anyone who happens to be reading in whose face I laughed yesterday at the notion of frozen precipitation--not that I expect there are any of you--I would hereby like to express my deep and sincere desire that you sod off immediately. I mean seriously, the meteorologists get the forecast right once every two weeks and they feel generally good about themselves, so surely I, a relatively climatologically uninformed civilian can be excused of being on this one isolated occasion somewhat less than precognitive.
That being established, I come back to the point on which I entered. I awoke at approximately 0800 this morning and new instantly that something was amiss. Some intangible something nibbled inquisitively at the back of my mind like a small mouse on a bag of non-soy-based imitation cheese-flavored snack food product. Then it hit me. My alarm clock, that is. At some point during the night, I must have dislodged it from its resting place on the corner of my combination desk/worktable. The impact of cheap Taiwanese plastic on scalp was surprisingly loud in the tomb-like early morning stillness. I knew immediately the source of the nagging disquiet in my mind. It is NEVER quiet here, morning or otherwise. The best I can normally hope for is a sort of subdued cacophony. This inexplicable silence could only mean that some terrible, unthinkable catastrophe--something on a par with a major glacial impact at least--must be upon us, I thought. Being ever the impulsive one, I elected on the spur of the moment to turn over and go back to sleep. Unfortunately, now that I had been awake for some moments, it was no longer just my mind that was being nagged at. I stumbled blearily to the bathroom and made my daily obeisance to the porcelain god. A few moments of functional consciousness served to convince me that I was, for the time being, at least, not going to be able to go back to sleep. So I decided to go and investigate the overwhelming dearth of intolerable noise with which I found myself presented. I stuck my head out the front door to reconnoiter, and...
I should note at this point that, after having lived in this particular location for as long as I have, I was fully prepared to behold anything up to and including minor human sacrifice (campus life is indeed an interesting one). What I was not at all ready to cope with was snow. The reader must remember, before he scoffs at my naivete, that, in the region of the Southeastern U.S. in which I live generates a decent snowfall only slightly less frequently than it generates conjoined sets of tap-dancing transvestite leprechauns.
I suppose I don't need to tell you that the excitement of witnessing the first legitimate snow of a long winter was more than enough to convince me to return at once to bed, whereupon I slept until nearly midday (it had been a long night).
So it was that I came to exchange the rigors of academia for the only slightly more potentially life-threatening rigors of an early-afternoon snowball fight.
All, I thought, must assuredly be well on such a fine, crisp, snowy winter's morn. The giddy laughter, the ominous whisk-smunch of compacted snow colliding with ice-cold skin, the dismayed shriek of those who apparently occasionally forget that ice crystals provide little in the way of friction...
Add to that the simple joys of bonding with friends, a somewhat less than quiet late afternoon spirited away in the solitude of my room with my very significant other (ahem), and the--much appreciated--occasional attractive young coed braving winter's maelstrom in an extremely insubstantial bathing suit and I have myself a recipe for a fine day, right?
Snowballs to the head suck, most of my friends are bastards who are not at all above aiming snowballs at my head, said significant other couldn?t stay nearly long enough, and, pleasing as they are to watch, those uninhibited--or simply masochistic--young ladies are only just that: something pleasing to watch (and being that it was actually snowing, said eye-candy was understandably very fleeting indeed).
So now, as my wonderful snowbound Saturnalia comes to a graceful close, I find myself cold, wet, and still relatively...er...frustrated. I've spent the latter half of the evening flipping between The History Channel and the Democratic Debate on the television and trying to work some feeling back into my fingertips.
This is depressing; I used to love snow days...

UPDATE:
Apparently I can look forward to yet another weather-related sabbatical today, too.

One of Those Years...

You know the ones I'm talking about. First, everything seems to go wrong. So you change everything around, and for a few nanoseconds—much like the temporary vacuum in the immediate vicinity of an erupting volcano—you’re skippin’ down the cobblestones, just lookin’ for fun and feelin’ groovy, as the wise prophets once said. Then the universe looks you square in the eye and demands to know just why in Hell you aren’t miserable. So then that detestable Roman Status Quo leaps to his death from a thirty-story ledge and you’re left with nothing but a confounded look on your face and a pocket full of What the Hell do I do now?
Ok, so it was nothing as dramatic as all that. The truth is, as I’m sure most of you realize, in real life, few things ever are. On TV, maybe, where everyone demonstrates the adaptive capacity of a toothbrush, but not down here on the concrete-and-Velcro plane where you and I wrestle for the scraps of happiness at civilization’s heel.
My, aren’t we deep this evening? I don’t like the association that goes with that term…Deep… I’m deep, you’re deep, she’s deep. You know what else is deep? A hole. And do you, my friends, know what’s at the bottom of a hole? Well, that depends on how deep it is, I guess. But if it’s deep enough, it might just be eternity down there, and we, as humans, understandably have an aversion to eternity, as well as Olestra and anything involving Rosie O’Donnell.
Speaking of whom, I’m reminded of one of the things I intended to rant about this evening. Do any of you out there have an opinion on homosexual marriage? You do? Good. Keep it. That’s right, you heard me. Take your opinion and fold it up really, really small and tuck it safely down in the bottom of your left back pocket and do the world an enormous favor by sitting on it. Huh? What’s this? The Masked Logician stifling freedom of expression? Damned right. And you know why? Because this is—or damned well should be—a non-issue. I’m sick, physically ill to the point of projectile regurgitation of my fatty, thrice-processed American snack food substances, of one group of people bitching about the right of another group to take advantage of some social perk that they, the members of the first group, take as a gift straight from the callused hand of God. No, no that’s not fair. Bitching is not the appropriate term. But I’m not sure I know of a word that would encompass the depth and breadth of socio-emotional fuckery inherent in the rabid Right’s insistence that allowing a cheap copy-bond municipal courthouse printout of a marriage license to be signed by a homosexual couple would bring about the collapse of everything we hold dear, from the global economy to the very sun itself. Can anyone out there give me just one good—logical—reason why any one person should give a sweetly hemorrhaging fuck about who—or what, for that matter—another such person chooses to marry? No, I didn’t think so. That being the case, it becomes, as I said, a non-issue.
What the Hell brought that on? Well, for those of you fortunate enough to be unfamiliar with American politics never fear. If our beloved Caricature Executive has his way, you will be soon enough. But in the mean time, it seems the good ol’ Texan is trying his level best to add a convenient little amendment to the U.S. Constitution making it fundamentally unlawful for same-sex marriages to occur, and never mind the irony of installing into the constitution an amendment that is itself unconstitutional. Dubya can’t even spell unconstitutional. But then, Dubya can’t spell lots of words…
So then they say John Kerry to the rescue. But if it’s in oratorical superiority they intend to best the incumbent, hell, I’ve got navel lint that’ll do the job.
But enough politics. Surely, if there is anything good and pure within the depth of that force which I am constantly told lies at the heart of all existence, then there must, must be something else of at least passing relevance at large in the world. Frankly, I don’t know how professional political pundits refrain from inserting their genitalia into electrical outlets after a few days of that asininity.
But then, what else is really going on in the world right now?
Mel Gibson has made a movie about the crucifixion of Jesus Christ only to find himself—tee hee hee—crucified for his trouble. It’s a good thing irony isn’t toxic. Unfortunately, neither is stupidity…
On a much more immediately pressing personal note, I really, really abhor my newest roommate, who has obviously been visited upon me as retribution for all the unpleasant things I said about/wished upon/did to his predecessor.
And I suppose that I should note that the Mars Rover seems to be performing adequately, which is a marked improvement over past models. The Rover conducted tentative drilling on El Capitan yesterday, which sounds approximately as exciting as a re-broadcast cricket match to the MTV-viewing public, but apparently has the fine folks at NASA masturbating for sheer joy. I say good on them.

I only hope they don’t uncover any weapons of mass destruction…

Late-Breaking News

Today's Track: Cool Walter Kronkite-esque newsreel track

The long-awaited return of the Amazing Colossal Inconsistent Blogger?

Dare we believe?

Details at eleven...